Auto-MD-bench: Evaluating Autoresearch Agents for Real-World Medical Tasks

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support end-to-end medical-AI research workflows, moving beyond isolated prediction tasks or short-form clinical question answering. However, existing medical agent benchmarks primarily evaluate final outputs, providing limited visibility into agent behavior within the research process. To address this gap, we present AutoMedBench, a workflow-aware benchmark for autonomous medical-AI research across diverse medical imaging and multimodal inference tasks, organizing agent execution into a unified five-stage workflow (S1-S5): Plan, Setup, Validate, Inference, and Submit. It comprises long-horizon tasks with each run averaging 33 agent turns, spanning five research tracks: segmentation, image enhancement, visual question answering (VQA), report generation, and lesion detection. Each task is evaluated under two difficulty tiers, Lite and Standard, which use the same data and metrics but differ in the amount of task-brief scaffolding, and each run is scored using both final task performance and S1-S5 stage scores, enabling stage-level analysis from the initial task brief to the final submitted artifact. Across thousands of recorded runs, stage-level scoring reveals that Validate is the weakest workflow stage on average, whereas Setup is the strongest, suggesting that current agents are better at making pipelines executable than at verifying their reliability. Post-run error analysis further shows that verification and submission failures dominate tagged errors, accounting for 37.7% and 38.1% of fired codes respectively, whereas task-understanding errors are rare at 0.9%, and runs with one fired error code have a 48% lower overall score than runs with no error code on average.

As AI agents become increasingly capable of complex, long-horizon reasoning, rigorous evaluation is essential for measuring progress toward real-world healthcare applications. However, existing healthcare benchmarks are often static or narrow in clinical scope, motivating broader evaluation of agents acting on raw patient data. We introduce HealthAgentBench, a suite of 75 agentic healthcare tasks across 9 categories each with its unique environment. The benchmark suite spans diagnosis, specimen assessment, research, and data management workflows and a broad range of modalities. Each task is designed to replicate an end-to-end clinical workflow: given task instructions and supporting resources, an agent must explore raw healthcare data, operate within a complex environment, and execute multi-step solutions that go beyond naive prompting, such as querying large clinical databases or interpreting gigapixel pathology images. All tasks are scored using binary success criteria derived from reference labels, executable rules, or computational baselines. We evaluate six agents (three GPT models through Codex and three Claude models through Claude Code) with one scored attempt per task (450 evaluations). Overall success ranges from 32.0% to 57.3%; Claude Code Opus-5.5 leads with a 57.3% success rate, followed by GPT-6-astra and Sonnet-5.5 at 50.7% each. Performance varies substantially by category with specialized imaging modalities such as CT and MRI being especially difficult. HealthAgentBench provides a challenging and realistic benchmark with substantial room for future progress. We release our benchmark athttps://github.com/microsoft/HealthAgentBench.

We introduce PhysicianBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on physician tasks grounded in real clinical setting within electronic health record (EHR) environments. Existing medical agent benchmarks primarily focus on static knowledge recall, single-step atomic actions, or action intent without verifiable execution against the environment. As a result, they fail to capture the long-horizon, composite workflows that characterize real clinical systems. PhysicianBench comprises 100 long-horizon tasks adapted from real consultation cases between primary care and subspecialty physicians, with each task independently reviewed by a separate panel of physicians. Tasks are instantiated in an EHR environment with real patient records and accessed through the same standard APIs used by commercial EHR vendors. Tasks span 21 specialties (e.g., cardiology, endocrinology, oncology, psychiatry) and diverse workflow types (e.g., diagnosis interpretation, medication prescribing, treatment planning), requiring an average of 27 tool calls per task. Solving each task requires retrieving data across encounters, reasoning over heterogeneous clinical information, executing consequential clinical actions, and producing clinical documentation. Each task is decomposed into structured checkpoints (670 in total across the benchmark) capturing distinct stages of completion graded by task-specific scripts with execution-grounded verification. Across 13 proprietary and open-source LLM agents, the best-performing model achieves only 46% success rate (pass@1), while open-source models reach at most 19%, revealing a substantial gap between current agent capabilities and the demands of real-world clinical workflows. PhysicianBench provides a realistic and execution-grounded benchmark for measuring progress toward autonomous clinical agents.