AgentDS Technical Report: Benchmarking the Future of Human-AI Collaboration in Domain-Specific Data Science
Authors: An Luo, Jin Du, Xun Xian, Robert Specht, Fangqiao Tian, Ganghua Wang, Xuan Bi, Charles Fleming, +7 more
Organizations: School of Statistics, University of Minnesota · AIScientists, Inc. · Data Science Institute, University of Chicago · Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota · Cisco Research · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota · Division of Computational Health Sciences, University of Minnesota
Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) agents have significantly automated data science workflow. However, it remains unclear to what extent AI agents can match the performance of human experts on domain-specific data science tasks, and in which aspects human expertise continues to provide advantages. We introduce AgentDS, a benchmark and competition designed to evaluate both AI agents and human-AI collaboration performance in domain-specific data science. AgentDS consists of 17 challenges across six industries: commerce, food production, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and retail banking. We conducted an open competition involving 29 teams and 80 participants, enabling systematic comparison between human-AI collaborative approaches and AI-only baselines. Our results show that current AI agents struggle with domain-specific reasoning. AI-only baselines perform below the top quartile of competition participants, while the strongest solutions arise from human-AI collaboration. These findings challenge the narrative of complete automation by AI and underscore the enduring importance of human expertise in data science, while illuminating directions for the next generation of AI. Visit the AgentDS website here: https://agentds.org/ and open source datasets here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lainmn/AgentDS .
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of AgentDS. The framework comprises three stages: (1) data preparation, where domain-specific challenges are built using realistic synthetic multimodal data and validated by experts; (2) a time-limited competition supporting global participation and human–AI collaboration; and (3) results, including submissions, shared insights, awards, and community engagement, which provide empirical evidence on human, AI, and collaborative performance.
Domain
Challenge
Problem
Metric
Additional Modalities
Commerce
Demand Forecasting
Regression
RMSE
Text, CSV
Product Recommendation
Ranking
NDCG@10
Image, CSV
Coupon Redemption
Classification
Macro-F1
JSON
Food Production
Shelf Life Prediction
Regression
MAE
JSON
Quality Control
Classification
Macro-F1
Image, JSON
Demand Forecasting
Regression
RMSE
Text, CSV
Table 1: An Overview of Challenges in AgentDS Across Six Domains
Figure 2: Overall quantile score comparison between all AI baselines and competition teams (n=29). Among agentic baselines, MorphMind (dark green, score: 0.510) ranks 9th, Claude Code (orange-red, score: 0.458) ranks 10th, and Julius AI (rose, score: 0.382) ranks 11th, all above the participant median of 0.156 (dashed line). Among direct prompting LLM baselines, GPT-5.5 (dark gray, score: 0.415) ranks 11th, Claude Opus 4.7 (tan, score: 0.391) ranks 11th, DeepSeek V4 Pro (blue, score: 0.325) ranks 11th, Gemini 3.1 Pro (purple, score: 0.216) ranks 14th, and GPT-4o (light gray, score: 0.183) ranks 14th. Bars are sorted descending by score (Team 1 = best); all AI baselines are inserted at their rank positions. The overall quantile score is the mean of domain scores, each of which is itself the mean of per-challenge quantiles within that domain, with 1.0 indicating best performance and 0.0 indicating non-participation. The result shows that current AI-only baselines, whether using direct prompting or agentic coding, do not match the performance of the top human teams in the competition, highlighting a substantial gap between AI automation and human-AI collaboration.
Figure 3: Distribution of domain-level quantile scores across all participants (teal dots), with agentic baselines indicated by filled circles (MorphMind: dark green; Claude Code: orange-red; Julius AI: rose) and direct prompting LLM baselines by filled triangles (Claude Opus 4.7: tan; Gemini 3.1 Pro: purple; DeepSeek V4 Pro: blue; GPT-5.5: dark gray; GPT-4o: light gray). Agentic baselines outperform all direct prompting LLMs across most domains: MorphMind has its highest domain scores in Healthcare (0.699) and Manufacturing (0.647), Claude Code in Retail Banking (0.553), and Julius AI in Healthcare (0.584) and Manufacturing (0.500). Among LLM baselines, GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 are competitive in several domains (e.g., Food Production: 0.573 and 0.603 respectively). Nonetheless, all baselines remain well below the top-performing participants in each domain, confirming that current agentic coding tools cannot yet replicate the domain-specific strategies of expert human data scientists.
Figure 4: Challenge-specific quantile score distributions across six domains. Teal dots represent participants who submitted for each challenge (zero-score non-participants excluded from display); gray dashed lines indicate per-challenge participant medians among submitters. Agentic baselines are shown as filled circles (MorphMind: dark green; Claude Code: orange-red; Julius AI: rose) and direct prompting LLM baselines as filled triangles (Claude Opus 4.7: tan; Gemini 3.1 Pro: purple; DeepSeek V4 Pro: blue; GPT-5.5: dark gray; GPT-4o: light gray). MorphMind obtains high challenge-level scores on several tasks, including Manufacturing Ch. 1 (0.786), Healthcare Ch. 1 (0.750), and Healthcare Ch. 3 (0.783). Claude Code records its largest gains over GPT-4o in Retail Banking Ch. 1 (0.737 vs. 0.316) and Commerce Ch. 1 (0.625 vs. 0.000). Julius AI peaks on Insurance Ch. 1 (0.786), Food Production Ch. 2 (0.714), and Healthcare Ch. 1 (0.708), but scores zero on Food Production Ch. 1, Commerce Ch. 2, Insurance Ch. 3, and Retail Banking Ch. 1. Among direct prompting LLMs, GPT-5.5 peaks on Food Production Ch. 1 (0.933) and Commerce Ch. 3 (0.800), while Claude Opus 4.7 leads in Retail Banking Ch. 1 (0.789). No baseline achieves top-quartile performance on every challenge, suggesting that current AI-only approaches still fall short of the best human-AI collaboration teams under this evaluation protocol.
Figure 5: Performance of five direct-prompting LLM baselines (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-4o) on the AgentDS benchmark, compared with the best human–AI collaboration team (dashed teal). Each radial axis is a quantile in [0,1] : the fraction of non-zero human submissions a baseline outperforms on that challenge, averaged across challenges per domain or modality. Left (By domain): mean per-challenge quantile within each of six domains. Right (By modality): mean per-challenge quantile over all challenges tagged with each additional data modality. GPT-5.5 ranks highest in this cohort (overall 0.415), with its strongest domain results in Food Production (0.573) and Manufacturing (0.526), but near-floor modality scores on PDF (0.040) and Text (0.130). Claude Opus 4.7 (overall 0.391) leads direct-prompting models on Retail Banking (0.605) and performs moderately on JSON (0.440). DeepSeek V4 Pro (overall 0.325) is middling and uneven across domains. Gemini 3.1 Pro (overall 0.216) and GPT-4o (overall 0.183) trail substantially. No direct-prompting model approaches the best human–AI collaboration team (overall 0.860; domain quantiles 0.740–1.000; modality quantiles 0.830–0.920). Structured modalities (JSON, CSV) represent the relative strength of LLMs, occasionally reaching 0.4–0.6, while Image and PDF remain near 0.1–0.3 for most models. LLMs underperform the best human–AI collaboration on every domain and modality, with particularly sharp deficits on multimodal and document-heavy tasks.
Figure 6: Performance of agentic coding baselines (MorphMind, Julius AI, Claude Code) on the AgentDS benchmark, compared with the best human–AI collaboration team (dashed teal). Each radial axis is a quantile in [0,1] : the fraction of non-zero human submissions a baseline outperforms on that challenge, averaged across challenges per domain or modality. Left (By domain): for each of six domains, the plotted value is the mean of per-challenge quantiles within that domain. Right (By modality): for each additional data modality (JSON, CSV, Image, PDF, Text), the value is the mean quantile over all challenges whose additional modality set contains that modality. Among the three agentic coding baselines, MorphMind has an overall mean domain quantile of 0.510, with domain scores of 0.699 in Healthcare and 0.647 in Manufacturing, and modality scores of 0.590 on PDF and 0.570 on JSON. Claude Code has an overall mean domain quantile of 0.458, with higher scores in Retail Banking (0.553) and Commerce (0.450). Julius AI has an overall mean domain quantile of 0.382 , with relatively higher performance on Text (0.580) and lower scores on PDF (0.240) and Retail Banking (0.130). However, all agentic baselines occupy only the inner half of the radar, indicating a large gap between current agentic coding tools and the best human-AI collaboration performance across every domain and modality.
Real-world data science involves long-horizon workflows that span data wrangling, exploration, modeling, visualization, and validation, and require coordinated use of tools such as notebooks, IDEs, terminals, browsers, and databases within real operating environments. Yet existing benchmarks lack real-computer interaction and do not evaluate whether agents can execute complete end-to-end data-science workflows in realistic computing environments, failing to capture the multi-stage, multi-tool nature of data-science practice. We introduce DSAgentBench, the first benchmark to evaluate whether agents can automate full data-science workflows inside real computer environments. DSAgentBench contains 275 diverse tasks covering the entire data-science life-cycle, reflecting the complexity and tool coordination required in practice. Each task requires grounding decisions in intermediate outputs and coordinated tool use, and includes a deterministic evaluator that verifies analytical correctness, visual outputs, and model performance rather than code-only execution. Our extensive experiments with 15 closed- and open-source models show that even the strongest agent, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, achieves only 56.70% task success, while all open-source agents remain below 1%, frequently failing at tool orchestration, OS grounding, and multi-step reasoning. These results reveal a substantial capability gap between current agentic systems and real data-science workflows, positioning DSAgentBench as a foundation for developing grounded, verifiable, autonomous data-science agents. We release DSAgentBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DSAgentBench.
Mizanur Rahman, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Ridwan Mahbub +3
York University · Nanyang Technological University · Salesforce AI Research
Data science aims to derive actionable insights from heterogeneous raw data, unlocking the value of the massive amounts of data generated in modern society. Automating this process is essential to reducing labor-intensive efforts for data scientists and enabling scalable data-driven applications. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based data agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate data science workflows. However, the field lacks comprehensive benchmarks to rigorously evaluate these agents across diverse scenarios with fine-grained granularity. To address this gap, we propose AgenticDataBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring realistic tasks spanning diverse domains with fine-grained ground-truth labels. This enables evaluations to capture the diversity and complexity of data science workflows and the detailed performance of agents. First, to cover diverse domains, we collect real datasets and tasks from 15 vertical domains, including 5 real-world B2B use cases from a leading fintech company. Second, to remove redundancy in real-world tasks and generate high-quality tasks for domains lacking real data, we introduce data science skills, recurring data-centric operational patterns, and quantify benchmark coverage by the number of skills included. Representative skills are extracted from large-scale task solutions on Stack Overflow using skill-aligned hierarchical clustering. Third, for real-world business tasks, we select task-solution pairs that maximize diversity in skill composition, ensuring broad coverage of practical scenarios. Fourth, to generate realistic tasks for devise domains without real tasks, we propose a systematic LLM-based task generation approach to create workflows and tasks based on these skills. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art data agents using our annotated benchmark and open-sourced testbed, providing detailed skill-level insights.
Zhaoyan Sun, Shan Zhong, Daizhou Wen +10
Tsinghua University · Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group
Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04% to 11.30%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.
Maojun Sun, Yifei Xie, Yue Wu +5
Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University