AI Agent Benchmarks

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148 papers in the last four weeks, up 185% on the four weeks before. 1.5% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 1,013

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

GABench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents on Graph Analysis Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of planning, using tools, and interacting with external environments. They are typically supported by harnesses, which manage state and coordinate multi-step execution. Graph analysis provides a promising setting for evaluating their agentic capabilities, because it requires agents to access data and execute operations in a graph environment. However, existing graph benchmarks for LLMs provide limited coverage of graph tasks and graph types, making it difficult to comprehensively evaluate LLM agents. Moreover, they typically formulate graph analysis as text-based question answering, where graph information is directly provided in the prompt, limiting the evaluation of end-to-end agentic capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce GABench, a comprehensive benchmark for agentic graph analysis. GABench spans three graph types and covers four graph analysis task categories: graph retrieval, graph theory, graph machine learning, and graph open-ended question answering. GABench also provides 84 executable tools for accessing graph data and performing diverse graph operations. Building on these tools, we develop an agentic graph analysis task generation pipeline and construct 10,400 tasks with verifiable ground truth.Using GABench, we evaluate a range of frontier LLMs and agent harnesses. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) Existing LLM agents still struggle with complex graph analysis tasks. (2) Harness choice significantly affects performance, yet existing harnesses remain limited on complex graph tasks. (3) Graph analysis depends more on tool-call quality than quantity. Our findings provide practical insights into the development and evaluation of LLM agents for graph analysis.

Jiarui Tan, Zhongjian Zhang, YaBo Guo +5

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Peking University

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Harnesses

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

GISAgentBench: A Practitioner-Sourced Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents on GIS Tasks

Geographic Information System (GIS) professionals rely on multi-step spatial analysis workflows to support decision-making in urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. The process is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. While recent large language model (LLM) agents equipped with external tools have the potential to automate geospatial analysis, their ability to perform realistic GIS workflows remains largely unexplored. Existing GIS agent benchmarking datasets are mostly drawn from textbooks, tutorials, or LLM-generated seeds and remain limited in size and trajectory depth. More importantly, none provides ground truth outputs. They therefore rely on surrogate signals such as code similarity, trajectory matching, or LLM and VLM judges, which can conflate workflow resemblance with task correctness. To address this gap, we introduce GISAgentBench, a benchmark of 349 multi-step GIS tasks curated from GIS Stack Exchange and instantiated on real public data across six selected geographic areas of interest. Each task ships with an executable reference trajectory and an exact ground truth output file, enabling strict, deterministic, tolerance-aware output matching beyond LLM judging. Evaluations of six LLM models reveal that realistic GIS workflows remain challenging: the best agent completes only 32.7% of tasks under strict tolerance-aware scoring, although most models produce outputs that are close to the ground truth.

Abhinav Pothuri, Zhe Jiang, Zelin Xu +1

Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida · Department of Geography, University of Florida

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Spatial Reasoning

Aug 2, 2026cs.AR

EDATracer: An Agentic Framework for Large-Scale EDA Artifact Analysis

Modern chip design relies on electronic design automation (EDA) tools that generate large, heterogeneous artifacts, including source files, scripts, logs, netlists, and reports. Analyzing these artifacts is critical for debugging, optimization, and design-flow understanding, but remains difficult because relevant evidence is often distributed across many artifact types and design stages. Although LLM agents show promise for EDA assistance, existing approaches lack public benchmarks for large-scale cross-artifact analysis and often struggle to ground reasoning in tool-generated evidence. We present EDATracer, an agentic framework for evidence-grounded EDA artifact analysis. EDATracer organizes design artifacts into a knowledge graph paired with a semantic vector index, enabling LLM agents to retrieve evidence across source files, logs, netlists, and reports. We curate an 18.9 GB dataset of 2,787 synthesizable open-source chip designs and introduce a 90-question benchmark spanning factual, statistical, and reasoning tasks. Across evaluated agents, EDATracer achieves the best pass@1 accuracy, outperforming Cursor and Claude Code by 6.4 and 7.2 percentage points on average, while using 2.0-3.2x fewer tokens.

Phat Tieu, Sayanti Jana, Matthew DeLorenzo +5

Texas A&M University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering College Station, Texas 77840, USA

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Electronic Design Automation AI Agent Benchmarks

Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Long-Horizon Embodied Decision-Making via Multimodal Memory Compression

Agents are increasingly expected to act not only as task executors, but also as decision-makers on behalf of human users. This shift requires agents to accumulate evidence over long horizons, interpret implicit user preferences, and compare multiple candidates under partial observations. In this work, we propose DunphyBench, a new benchmark for evaluating agents on long-horizon human-centered embodied decision-making, where the agent must navigate through multiple embodied housing environments and make decisions that align with multi-dimensional human preferences. Unlike standard embodied reasoning tasks that often focus on procedural planning or immediate goal completion, our setting requires agents to integrate multimodal, multi-source input into coherent knowledge that supports complex reasoning across long horizon. The evaluation results reveal that there is a substantial gap between current agents and human performance. Furthermore, our diagnosis of state-of-the-art VLM-driven agents reveals that memory management is one of the bottlenecks, where raw multimodal history introduces noise that hinders decision quality. Motivated by this finding, we design MeMento, a preference-conditioned multimodal memory compressor that selectively compresses decision-relevant information from long-horizon history based on user preferences with a fixed set of memory tokens. Experiments show that MeMento helps VLM-driven agents improve accuracy by 7.18%, while reducing memory usage by 85.38% compared to the strongest baseline.

Bingxuan Li, Rui Yang, Cheng Qian +6

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Northwestern University

Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Embodied AI Memory-Augmented Agents

Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

HopRefusalBench: Diagnosing Refusal Failures in Search-Augmented Agents for Multi-Hop Reasoning

Search-augmented large language model agents are increasingly capable of solving knowledge-intensive tasks, but their behavior when a multi-hop question is fundamentally unanswerable remains poorly understood. Existing abstention benchmarks largely expose defects at the surface of single-hop queries and therefore cannot reveal failures that emerge only after valid intermediate reasoning and retrieval. We introduce HopRefusalBench, the first controlled benchmark of refusal within multi-hop search, comprising 889 unanswerable questions constructed from KILT-grounded entity paths. It crosses three causes of unanswerability (answer unknown, false premise, and underspecified context) with root, middle, and terminal topologies, making premise verification, intermediate-bridge validation, and terminal stopping separately observable. We further propose a final-outcome taxonomy spanning target-aware refusal, pseudo-refusal, hallucinated completion, and search-budget exhaustion, together with source-aware trajectory metrics for post-trigger continuation and token waste. Across ten frontier proprietary and open-weight models in search-augmented mode, the best model achieves a target-aware correct halting rate (TCHR) of only 42.9%. Root and middle items are consistently harder than terminal items, and all models attain their highest TCHR on false premises and their lowest on underspecified questions. Yet when pooled across categories, 84.7--98.4% of each model's explicit refusal-like responses identify the correct rationale, localizing the main bottleneck to committing to an appropriate non-answer; failed trajectories instead diverge into hallucination or search-budget exhaustion. These results establish refusal in multi-hop search as a consequential evaluation problem and provide a foundation for diagnosing and improving the reliability of search-augmented agents.

Jianan Xie, Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen +3

ShanghaiTech University · NLPR, MAIS, CASIA · Ant Group

Multi-Hop QA AI Agent Benchmarks Refusal Behavior in Language Models LLM Abstention LLM Agent Reliability

Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

Same Task, Different Work: Prompt-Induced Waste in Coding Agents

Two prompts can request the same code change and produce the same correct patch, yet cause a coding agent to perform radically different kinds and amounts of work. We study this effect in a preregistered benchmark spanning 4,644 valid runs, 24 deterministic coding tasks, seven reasoning models, and two real agent harnesses. The central finding is that prompt wording does not merely scale total effort; it changes where that effort is spent. Multiple approaches and deep thinking primarily inflate reasoning. Multiple approaches increases reasoning by 2.4x to 7.4x across all six open models and creates about three elaborated but discarded solution branches, while still yielding only one implemented solution and no success gain. Maximum certainty activates a different pathway: repeated verification propagates into extra test runs, tool calls, turns, latency, and context growth. Runs with high redundant verification cost 18x the clean-run median, execute 2.5x more tool calls, and take 3x longer, again without a success gradient. These mechanisms therefore have distinct cost carriers: some prompts are reasoning-heavy and token-borne, while others are tool-heavy and system-borne. Harness design amplifies both effects and changes cost per successful task by 5x to 30x in our setting. The findings survive a frozen holdout, paraphrase tests, a Kimi-K3 replication, and a first-party Claude Sonnet 5 study. In contrast, bounded-efficiency wording preserves diagnosis and final validation while avoiding the measured waste mechanisms. Prompt engineering for coding agents is therefore work design: it determines what the agent thinks through, what it executes, and when it stops.

Sarel Weinberger, Amir Hozez

PointFive

LLM Inference Efficiency Overthinking in Language Models AI Coding Agents AI Agent Benchmarks

Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

ShiJianBench: From Dialogue to Decision for Long-Horizon Evaluation of Investment Advisors

Conversational investment advisors influence not only what users know, but also how they make subsequent decisions as market conditions evolve. Existing evaluations primarily assess response quality or observed outcomes, leaving the long-horizon pathway from advisor language to investor behavior difficult to audit. We introduce ShiJianBench, an offline framework for evaluating conversational investment advisors through matched investor trajectories under fixed historical market feedback. At its core is a multi-agent investor simulator with explicit evolving state variables, motive-driven deliberation, long-term memory, and dialogue-grounded updates. The simulator is calibrated against aggregate behavioral patterns from 7,199 real users, and advisor policies are evaluated using separate investor-side, service-side, and content-side metrics under a hard compliance gate. Experiments on Chinese fund-market traces from 2021 to 2026 identify a stable leading group of LLM advisors that combines substantially stronger personalized content with competitive investor-side trajectory outcomes. These results reveal a systematic distinction between producing a high-quality response and delivering an effective long-horizon intervention, motivating trajectory-aware evaluation of conversational advisors.

Jie Gong, Maowei Jiang, Zhiwei Liu +14

School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University · Nanjing Audit University · The University of Manchester +3

Financial Services Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Finance Financial Decision-Making

Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

Control Under Compression: Reliability Frontiers for Tool-Using Agents

Tool-using language-model agents are governed not only by task prompts but also by persistent system-side instructions that specify tools, arguments, policies, execution protocols, and recovery. Compressing these agent control contexts (ACCs) can reduce input cost and context use, yet existing prompt-compression evaluations do not reveal whether the resulting control remains operationally reliable. We introduce CompressAgent, an environment-verified benchmark for ACC compression across nine independently constructed ACCs, three task families, three fixed Qwen API model identifiers, six retained-context budgets, and 15,525 runs. We uncover a nonlinear, method-dependent reliability frontier. At 75% retained context, generic rewriting and section-based compression achieve 92.7% and 92.4% success, close to the 93.8% full-context baseline. Between 50% and 35%, methods diverge sharply; at 35%, section-based, obligation-aware, and generic rewriting achieve 47.0%, 39.0%, and 19.9%. At retained-context budgets from 25% to 10%, executable protocols become fragile. Reliability also varies substantially across ACCs, making universal compressor rankings inappropriate and motivating per-context qualification. Failure analysis shows that compression primarily surfaces as tool-execution and action-parsing errors. These findings recast ACC compression from token reduction into a runtime-reliability problem that must be evaluated through executable outcomes.

Yinghan Hou, Zongyou Yang

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London London, United Kingdom · Dyson School of Design Engineering Imperial College London London, United Kingdom

AI Agent Reliability AI Agent Benchmarks Tool-Using Agents LLM Agent Reliability Prompt Compression

Aug 2, 2026cs.SE

What Could the Agent See at 19:05? Generating Temporal Enterprise Scenarios from Real Research and Replaying Them to Evaluate Agents

Enterprise AI agents act across many apps whose data changes continuously, so an answer is correct only relative to what data existed and who could see it at the moment it was asked. Offline evaluation today grades against a single static snapshot, effectively the end of the episode. So, it can only evaluate one situation, the final one, even though every earlier moment of the episode is a different situation that invites its own realistic questions with its own correct answers. Recreating each of those moments as a separate snapshot would mean re-provisioning a whole tenant per instant, which is prohibitively costly; and even a single snapshot leaks future state hidden inside records and cannot represent the multi-app, time-ordered way real work happens. Our system closes two gaps at once: it generates a realistic, persona-driven, temporally-evolving enterprise world from real research, and replays that world at any chosen moment to evaluate any pluggable agent. A schema-inferred temporal description drives a deterministic-plus-LLM rebuild of each record's past state; because the queryable moments are finite, all rebuilds are precomputed into a compact difference cache, making evaluation a fast, reproducible lookup with no model in the path. We describe the design, an architecture spanning both flows, and early experience evaluating enterprise agents.

Tezan Sahu, Himani Arora

Microsoft Hyderabad, India

AI Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks

Aug 2, 2026cs.CR

CallScreenBench: Benchmarking On-Device Models as Phone Secretaries

Language models small enough to run on a handset, quantized to a few bits, are increasingly capable of acting for their user, making on-device task automation newly plausible. One such task is answering the phone. A phone secretary takes an unknown inbound call on its owner's behalf. Unlike the agents evaluated by most benchmarks, it has no task to complete and no cooperative user: the caller holds the goal, may be an adversary, and must be judged from the opening turn with no oracle. What matters is not task success, but whether the owner would endorse how their proxy handled the call. We present CallScreenBench, which scores this setting on five quality dimensions. Each dimension is printed beside the counter-metric that bills it and is never averaged into a single number. We also report a guardedness profile for a toolless proxy that holds no credentials and calls no tools. Across six on-device models (0.6-4B parameters, 4-bit quantization), quality scales with capability, but triage does not. The appearance that it does is an artifact of measurement. Scripted degenerate agents supply the missing floors: after correcting for them, the number of model pairs whose triage performance separates falls from 11 of 15 to zero at the preregistered operating point. An agent that simply hangs up and echoes the caller also scores perfect message fidelity. We report which of our own metrics these floors defeat and declare no pass/fail threshold.

Simiao Ren

On-Device Language Model Inference LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks AI Agent Safety Benchmarks

Aug 2, 2026cs.LG

Who Belongs in the Eval Set? A Capability-Taxonomy-Driven Pipeline for Curating Regression Eval Sets in Agent-Extensibility Platforms

Platform teams hosting agent-extensibility surfaces face a regression-economics paradox: every onboarding customer ships an evaluation set tuned to their domain, but the platform's regression set must live under a hard query-count ceiling bounded by release cadence. To our knowledge, no published industrial pipeline addresses this platform-side curation problem: existing evaluation frameworks are customer-side, and benchmark-compression work treats benchmarks as fixed pools rather than streams of incoming sets. We describe a capability-taxonomy-driven curation pipeline applied to declarative agents with custom actions in Microsoft 365 Copilot. It takes an agent specification and a customer's eval set as input, projects each query into a platform-owned capability taxonomy, and outputs per-query decisions (admit, drop, swap, or human review), under the philosophy that a healthy regression set is the minimal set of queries capturing the maximal spread of capability signatures -- distinct combinations of capabilities a query exercises together. Three components instantiate this: a classifier producing per-(query, capability) verdicts via a hybrid of deterministic specification-based extraction and large-language-model (LLM) semantic inference; an Invocation Quality (IQ) rater scoring how thoroughly a query exercises each capability, so a new query sharing a signature with an existing entry can still be recognized as a better test and displace it; and a consolidator comparing incoming queries against the regression set on coverage and quality through a rule-based decision cascade, backed by a conservative curator that only suggests evictions. The mechanism is taxonomy-agnostic and applies to any regression eval-set curation problem with a typed capability taxonomy, including taxonomies that evolve in response to the very evidence the pipeline surfaces.

Tezan Sahu, Aritra Das, Pankaj Mittal +1

Microsoft Hyderabad, India · Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee Roorkee, India

Benchmark Construction LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Automated Evaluation

Aug 1, 2026cs.LG

AdvPlan-Bench: Adversarial Evaluation of Structured Plan-Generation Agents

Structured plan-generation agents are often evaluated as if a plan has quality in isolation, yet many realistic planning tasks require asking how a candidate behaves when another agent can search for responses. We introduce AdvPlan-Bench, an offline benchmark for adversarial evaluation of structured plan-generation agents. The contribution is a general evaluation object: a typed plan, an adversarial response set, selector diagnostics, and traceable candidate-frontier metrics. AdvPlan-Bench represents plans as typed action chains with optional branches, assigns synthetic quality scores, compares opposing plans with BLUE-vs-RED advantage and Nash-gap diagnostics, and evaluates qualitative constraint coherence with a transparent heuristic rubric. In 150 synthetic scenarios spanning five planning templates, a sampled best-response policy that draws eight response candidates reduces BLUE advantage from .518 to .486 and BLUE win rate from .900 to .820 relative to a single-sample response. An offline LLM-policy contract baseline reaches .496 BLUE advantage and .700 BLUE win rate, while a two-stage multi-agent council obtains .509 BLUE advantage and .813 BLUE win rate. A three-rater rubric-sensitivity study over 600 rating records yields .978 inter-rater agreement. AdvPlan-Bench is not an operational planner and provides no evidence about real-world decision quality; it is a reproducible benchmark artifact for studying adversarial plan evaluation, response-budget sensitivity, candidate frontiers, and multi-agent critique-and-revision traces.

Alina Kapanova, Arun Kanhai, Natan Vidra +1

Anote AI · Cornell University · CUNY +1

AI Agent Benchmarks Synthetic Benchmark Generation Multi-Agent Planning

Aug 1, 2026cs.AI

AgentSLABench: Evaluating and Benchmarking Agentic Systems Under Resource Constraints

We present AgentSLABench, a resource-aware evaluation framework for autonomous AI agents that measures correctness alongside latency, cost, compute, memory, and network usage under declared resource budgets. Unlike standard benchmarks that report only accuracy, AgentSLABench produces a multi-dimensional profile per agent per task - the same way systems profilers (perf, pprof, cProfile) measure resource consumption of code, but extended with task correctness as a first-class dimension. AgentSLABench provides 16 task environments across 6 categories (5 core: multi-hop QA, retail substitution, code generation, web shopping, travel planning; 11 extended) with isolated Docker containers, declared CPU/memory/time/network budgets, sealed test sets with SHA256 hashes, and a standardized profiling protocol. We profile 5 general-purpose baseline agents (ReAct, PlanAndSolve, Reflexion, CoT, Random) plus 4 task-specialized agents, finding that specialized agents achieve 100% success on 3/5 core tasks (fact_qa, web_shopping, travel_planning) and 66.7-83.3% on retail and code_gen, while general baselines fail entirely on 4/5 domain tasks. Crucially, we report the Efficiency-Adjusted Success Rate (EASR) - success weighted by resource consumption relative to declared budgets - revealing that high accuracy at unbounded cost is not production-viable. We release the full infrastructure, sealed test sets, and profiling results to enable reproducible, resource-aware agent evaluation.

Meher Bhaskar Madiraju, Meher Sai Preetam Madiraju

AI Agent Evaluation Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?

Large language model (LLM) agents can self-evolve by continually improving from their own accumulated experience. However, existing studies predominantly adopt independent evaluation. Consequently, the behavior of self-evolving agents in realistic streaming settings, where agents adapt to diverse and complex task streams, remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we introduce AgentStream, a unified framework that evaluates self-evolving agents spanning diverse evolution components by organizing agentic benchmarks into a configurable task stream and instantiating the \texttt{Isolated}, \texttt{Sequential}, and \texttt{Interleaved} streaming scenarios at test time, which progressively vary the scope and domain composition of the stream. Over these scenarios, we combinatorially evaluate five representative self-evolving methods across three frontier foundation models, disentangling how model capability, method architecture, and streaming scenario jointly shape self-evolution. Our results show that self-evolution reliability varies across streaming scenarios, the benefit of self-evolution is gated by model capability and is non-monotonic in model strength, and no single method dominates across models and scenarios. These findings offer concrete guidance for selecting self-evolving methods across models and streaming scenarios. Overall, we advocate that self-evolving agents should be evaluated under realistic task streams rather than isolated single-task settings.

Dong Yan, Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu +4

School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Microsoft · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +1

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Reliability Self-Evolving Agents

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

AgentHPOBench: A Benchmark For Evaluating LLM Agents as Sequential Hyperparameter Optimizers

As LLMs evolve from code completion systems into autonomous scientific agents, evaluating their ability to conduct experiments has become increasingly important. Existing benchmarks typically focus on static code generation, paper replication, or final answer correctness, but do not directly assess whether agents can interpret experimental evidence and use it to guide subsequent hyperparameter decisions. To address this gap, we introduce AgentHPOBench, a sequential benchmark comprising 30 executable machine learning tasks across seven research categories. Each task begins with a validated baseline run, after which an agent performs several sequential interventions. At each step, the agent observes the accumulated configurations, metrics, and logs before proposing the next valid configuration. We evaluate 12 widely used agents and conventional HPO baselines under a unified protocol. The results show that current agents exhibit measurable experimental optimization ability across domains, but still face clear limitations in sustained iterative refinement, complex log diagnosis, and consistent progress toward reported reference performance.

Tianyu Huai, Tingshuo Fan, Xinchi Chen +5

Shanghai Innovation Institute · East China Normal University · OpenMOSS +1

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Autonomous Experimentation Hyperparameter Optimization

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

DungeonBench: A Benchmark for Rules-Rich Tactical Reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons Combat

Games and simulators make valuable benchmarks by turning decisions into measurable outcomes, but many current suites under-test rules-rich tactical reasoning: the ability to choose well when geometry, timing, resources, objectives, and rule interactions all matter at once. We introduce DungeonBench, a benchmark for tactical reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons combat, built to cover the vast majority of combat-relevant 2014 System Reference Document content whose effects can be resolved by the simulator while retaining mechanics that simplified combat simulators often abstract away. At each step, DungeonBench exposes a complete tactical observation, a pending decision, and an indexed list of executable options spanning movement, attacks, spells, reactions, objectives, preparation, and scarce resources. The task is to value legal choices whose consequences depend on action economy, creature traits, battlefield geometry, timing windows, and future encounters. DungeonBench has two tracks: Encounter, which evaluates local tactical play in single fights, and Day, which links encounters through persistent hit points, spell slots, consumables, preparation, and short-rest timing, forcing policies to trade off immediate tactical advantage against future survivability. The same engine-generated decision stream supports heuristic controllers, language-model policies, learned option rankers, and masked-action reinforcement-learning agents. We evaluate frontier language-model policies on this shared decision stream. Results show that full tactical observations do not saturate the benchmark: frontier policies often win direct encounters, but linked encounter days expose failures in resource budgeting, rest timing, and rule-aware tactical discipline.

Ismayil Ismayilov, Atakan Kara, Kaan Oktay

fal

Logical Reasoning Game-Playing Agents Benchmark Design Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks

Jul 31, 2026physics.chem-ph

MDArena: Evaluating Coding Agents on Realistic Molecular Dynamics Workflows

Accelerating scientific discovery is among the most consequential applications of AI, and computational biomolecular simulation stands out as a particularly promising target within this broader effort. Coding agents promise to automate significant portions of this workflow, yet their reliability on realistic molecular dynamics (MD) tasks remains poorly characterized. To address this issue, we introduce MDArena, a benchmark of 50 containerized tasks drawn from active biomolecular simulation projects, spanning 29 molecular systems and 14 broad research protocols, including trajectory analysis, complex system preparation, free-energy protocols, and enhanced sampling. We evaluate six model/harness configurations spanning Codex and OpenCode. Among the evaluated configurations, Codex GPT-5.5 at extra-high reasoning effort performs best, reaching 24/50 Strict-Pass@1 successes (48%), followed by Codex GPT-5.5 Medium with 21/50, and OpenCode Gemini Flash 3.5 with 20/50. Average correctness and process rewards are substantially higher than strict success rates across all configurations, indicating that agents frequently make meaningful partial progress but fail on the fine-grained details required for reproducible scientific workflows. Hard tasks remain largely unsolved, particularly membrane-protein system preparation and alchemical free-energy setup, both unsolved or near-unsolved by every evaluated configuration. MDArena thus exposes a substantial gap between the usefulness of coding agents as supervised assistants and their reliability as autonomous MD researchers, while providing a reproducible and extensible platform for tracking progress toward closing it.

Nithishwer Mouroug Anand, Wei-Tse Hsu, Kyle Vaccaro +6

Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford · Scripps Research Institute

Coding Agents Scientific Code Generation AI Agent Benchmarks Scientific Workflow Automation Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

MirrorCraft: Paired Evaluation under Hidden Rule Changes in Minecraft

With the prosperity of the large language models (LLMs), it has become an interesting topic: how do LLM-based agents work in Minecraft? Unfortunately, most existing benchmarks evaluate them under fixed game mechanics. High performance in these settings does not show whether an agent can continue making progress when familiar recipes, drops, and other rules change. In this paper, we introduce MirrorCraft, a paired benchmark for evaluating agents under hidden rule changes in Minecraft. Each Mirror world is a copy of its paired Vanilla world, with selected server-side rules modified by the corresponding datapack. Terrain, spawn, resource placement, objective, interface, and action budget remain matched within every Vanilla-Mirror pair. MirrorCraft includes five controlled biomes, six rule suites, three progression objectives, two model families, and six agent configurations under a shared Mineflayer interface. We evaluate task progress with deterministic advancement milestones and success rate and use the Rule Intervention Effect (RIE) to measure the performance change between matched Vanilla and Mirror worlds. The experiments show that hidden rule changes have strongly different effects across suites. Among the configurations evaluated without rule descriptions, ReAct achieves the highest pooled Mirror score. Providing the exact rules yields modest gains in average progress and completion across all three objectives. MirrorCraft extends Minecraft evaluation beyond fixed mechanics and provides a controlled setting for studying how agents use gameplay outcomes when the rules of the current world differ from familiar ones.

Jianxin Gao, Beini Hu, Runze Li +6

China Agricultural University, Beijing, China · Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China · Jilin University, Changchun, China +2

Game-Playing Agents LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Agentic AI

Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Learning Compositional Meta-Routing for Agentic Workflows: An Executable Benchmark

Agentic systems must decide not only what answer to produce, but which reasoning and execution operations should precede it. A controller may answer directly, decompose a request, retrieve evidence, execute code, delegate to a specialist, or verify an intermediate result. Existing routing work largely selects model endpoints, retrieval depth, or tools in isolation. We introduce an executable benchmark and a budget-aware meta-router that composes heterogeneous operations from raw task text. The benchmark contains 216 training, 72 development, 108 held-out test, and 108 locked lexical-shift challenge tasks across data analysis, frozen-corpus research, and document processing. Outcomes are machine checked after operations execute. Independent regularized logistic heads predict operation probabilities from word and character features, are temperature-scaled on development data, and are greedily composed under route-cost and action-count budgets. On the held-out test, the learned policy achieves 100% success versus 93.5% for strong static and fixed workflows, with 43% lower cost than the static policy; a matched learned one-shot router reaches 56.5%. On the untouched challenge split, learned success falls to 75.9% and trails static routing at 93.5%, while remaining 49% cheaper and exceeding one-shot routing by 34.3 points. The gap identifies lexical generalization, rather than route execution, as the principal limitation. These results establish a reproducible testbed and a bounded proof of concept, not evidence of live-LLM performance.

Natan Vidra, Alina Kapanova, Arun Kanhai +1

1Anote AI · 2Cornell University · 3CUNY +1

Agentic Workflows LLM Agent Workflow Optimization AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Routing

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

MMShopBench: A Real-Log Benchmark for Multimodal, Multi-Turn Shopping Agents

Online shoppers increasingly turn to AI shopping assistants, using images and multi-turn dialogue to express and refine product needs that are difficult to articulate in text alone. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on text-only or synthetic requests, underrepresenting complex real-world shopping requirements jointly expressed through images and language. We introduce MMShopBench, the first real-log benchmark for multimodal, multi-turn shopping agents. Built from carefully cleaned and manually annotated shopping logs, MMShopBench provides ground-truth annotations of each request's purchase intent and mandatory product requirements. Agents must infer these requirements jointly from user images and multi-turn dialogue, retrieve candidate products through image and text search, and verify that each candidate satisfies all requirements using its product images and structured attributes. We evaluate representative open-source and proprietary models using an evidence-grounded multimodal protocol and construct a companion training set for fine-tuning an open-source model. To ensure reproducible experimentation, we build an offline shopping sandbox, where fine-tuning substantially narrows the performance gap between our open-source model and leading proprietary models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our training data.

Zeying Hao, Hao Guo, Mengtao Xu +5

Alibaba Group

Multimodal IR Multimodal Search Agents AI Agent Benchmarks Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Multimodal Agents

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

InfraBench: Evaluating Infrastructure Agents Across Layers, Lifecycle, and Risk

Managing modern computing infrastructure has become a steadily harder problem due to the ever-increasing complexity. Recent advances in AI agents create a timely opportunity to automate infrastructure management tasks, but it remains unclear how well such agents can handle real-world infrastructure complexity. We present InfraBench, a benchmark suite for evaluating AI agents on realistic infrastructure tasks across the full system stack and full operational lifecycle with fine-grained risk assessment. Experiments with 15 agent-model configurations show that even the strongest agent cannot secure a full score across all tasks. Mean effective scores range from roughly 40% to 88% (with per-configuration standard errors of 6-12 points), repeating every task three times reveals that top configurations still pass only a fraction of their attempts, and per-check scoring exposes a general failure pattern: agents may routinely satisfy short-term objectives while leaving non-durable changes, broken distributed invariants, unsafe side effects, and uncleaned state behind. INFRABENCH, including its live leaderboard, tasks, and evaluation harness, is publicly available at infraben.ch.

Yuan Gao, Zeren Yang, Junnan Li +6

Wanxiang · University of Wisconsin–Madison · 2Iowa State University

AI Agent Reliability AI Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks AI Agent Safety Benchmarks

Jul 31, 2026cs.CL

Backtrader-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Algorithmic Trading with Self-Generated MCQs

Evaluating LLM coding agents in algorithmic trading is difficult because static benchmarks risk data contamination and numerical backtest outputs require ground truth from actual code execution. We present Backtrader-Bench, a framework with two complementary pipelines. A deterministic multiple-choice question (MCQ) pipeline generates questions from backtest configurations across five trading strategies, 33 templates, and three difficulty tiers, with an independent checker that re-derives every answer. A generator-solver filtering pipeline autonomously mines harder questions: a generator writes questions verified by executable code, converts them to MCQs, and discards any that a no-tool solver can answer without code execution. We evaluate 11 models without tools (10 runs each) and four with-tools configurations on a 30-question curated set. Tool-augmented agents reach 90.0% accuracy in a single pass (GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7), outperforming the best no-tools baselines (73.0%, averaged over 10 runs) by 17 percentage points. On 38 separately mined questions, no-tools accuracy drops further, with half the models falling to roughly random-chance level (25%). Beyond evaluation, the scalable MCQ infrastructure is designed to produce a training corpus for reinforcement learning, with the ultimate goal of building a specialized agent for quantitative trading workflows.

Ruoxi Zhao, Maziar Raissi

University of California, Riverside

AI Coding Agents LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Finance Algorithmic Trading

Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

MerchantBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Long-Term Coherence in E-Commerce Operations

Large language model agents are increasingly evaluated as autonomous tool users, yet most benchmarks focus on bounded tasks with immediate success criteria. Real-world deployments often require Long-Term Coherence, the capacity to preserve purposeful behavior across extended horizons while adapting decisions to accumulated evidence. Evaluating this capacity requires a persistent environment in which actions constrain future choices, feedback arrives at heterogeneous delays, and incoherent behavior produces measurable cumulative effects. Seller-side e-commerce provides a suitable setting for this evaluation through recurrent and interdependent decisions over Product Sourcing, Listing and Pricing Control, Cash-Flow Management, and Mixed-Latency Feedback Adaptation. We introduce MerchantBench, a 365-day order-level simulation grounded in 98,843 real e-commerce product records and equipped with 26 tools for agent interaction. MerchantBench couples promptly observable Upstream Supplier Events with delayed Downstream Order Outcomes, requiring agents to follow individual order lifecycles and revisit earlier decisions. We evaluate eight LLMs under two agent frameworks in 48 runs, each spanning 365 simulated days. Our results reveal a substantial gap between even the latest LLMs and human participants, with the best LLM configuration attaining only 27.3% of the mean final net assets achieved by human participants.

Qiming Shi, Yulong Tao, Linbo Jin +10

2State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University · 1Alibaba Group · School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University +2

LLM Agent Evaluation Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks E-Commerce Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Can LLM Agents Price Competitively? A Dynamic Multi-Attribute Auction Benchmark for Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce is moving from concept to deployed infrastructure: payment networks, retailers, and AI platforms are setting the stage for agents to transact on behalf of merchants and consumers. Yet whether the LLMs behind these agents can price competently in real markets, where customer preferences are hidden, competitors adapt in real time, and demand can shift without warning, has not been systematically tested. We introduce Bazaar, a dynamic sealed-bid benchmark for multi-attribute auction under these conditions. Despite its dynamics, the benchmark is grounded in closed-form customer utilities, enabling exact evaluation. Across 11 frontier LLMs from four providers, the leading agents on customer acquisition (e.g. Gemini 3.1 Pro) are often not the leading agents on profit (e.g. Opus 4.6). The ranking shifts again under demand shocks: agents that learned fastest pre-shock are typically the slowest to revise their beliefs afterwards, while Gemini 3.1 Pro recovers fastest despite not leading on profit. However, even the strongest agent captures less than a third of hindsight-optimal profit, suggesting current LLMs are progressing in agentic commerce but leave substantial headroom.

Shimaa Ahmed, Yiwei Cai, Mohsen Minaei +1

Visa Research

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agents Agentic Commerce Agentic AI

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Best Friends, Not Forever: Evaluating Long-Horizon Persona Collapse and Behavioral Drift in AI Companions

As AI companions increasingly mediate repeated social interaction, users may rely on a stable role and shared history, yet locally acceptable replies do not ensure that either persists. We study two observable long-horizon failures: 'persona collapse', the loss of a deployed role, boundaries, values, or style, and 'behavioral drift', the gradual or recurrent erosion of those properties. We introduce ANCHOR, a controlled synthetic audit that separately measures persona enactment and trajectory recall. The study contains 2,008 conversations spanning 27 personas, nine interaction schedules, three generated memory settings, and four evaluated models. The Identity Probe combines a sealed 102-item questionnaire with turn-level judgments, while the Trajectory Probe scores 110 calibrated counterfactual questions from 35 conversation banks. Our results show that no evaluated model and configuration reliably preserves either dimensions: trajectory accuracy averages only 44.4%, user-state recall remains near four-option chance, and no tested context condition or memory consistently resolves these failures. Questionnaire retention also varies by model and persona facet, disagrees with turn-level behavior, and is sensitive to evaluator choice. These results indicate that current systems do not yet reliably support long-horizon companion continuity and that audits must distinguish persona enactment, trajectory recall, evaluator provenance, and deployment context rather than collapse them into a single trust or stability score.

Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Akshara Prabhakar, Yu Li +2

Salesforce AI Research

Persona Consistency Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Companions AI Agent Benchmarks

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Model or Harness? An Interaction-Centric Taxonomy for Localizing Agent Failures

Existing evaluations often reduce agent failures to system-level outcomes, obscuring where the fault originated and which intervention would improve the agent system. This creates a repair-assignment problem: the same visible failure may call for model post-training, harness engineering, environment redesign, or benchmark repair depending on its source. Because agent behavior emerges from interactions among models, harnesses, users, tools, memory, and environments, outcome-level labels are often insufficient for improvement. Most failure taxonomies do little to resolve this problem because they are benchmark-specific and lack a shared structure. We introduce an interaction-centric taxonomy that localizes failures to the interactions in which they originate and identifies the responsible component. It organizes 41 failure modes by assigning each to an edge between two components and a fault side indicating where the repair belongs. This makes the taxonomy actionable: model-side failures identify targets for post-training, harness-side failures point to scaffolding and tool-integration fixes, and environment or grader failures reveal evaluation conditions requiring redesign. The schema applies across agent architectures, from coding assistants to long-horizon personal assistants and multi-agent systems. We ground the taxonomy in worked examples from public benchmarks, model system cards, published reports, and logged agent trajectories, and evaluate its reproducibility using independent reasoning agents as judges. Across four frontier models, the strongest judge reaches Cohen's

κ=0.76

against human category labels, suggesting that the categories capture shared structure rather than annotator-specific preferences.

Harsh Raj, Vipul Gupta, Anas Mahmoud +4

Scale AI

Agent Failure Analysis LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Reliability

Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

ORCA-bench: How Ready Are Language Model Agents for Oncall?

Large language models can write, patch, and search code, but oncall root cause analysis (RCA) demands something different: reasoning over noisy metrics, logs, traces, and source code, starting from ambiguous user-facing reports, often hours after the incident began. We introduce ORCA-bench, a benchmark that puts general-purpose coding agents in a production-fidelity oncall setting. ORCA-bench pairs 1,079 RCA tasks with six days of metrics, logs, and traces collected from an OpenTelemetry-instrumented microservice system under continuous simulated user load. Agents investigate this recorded history through real observability interfaces---Prometheus, Jaeger, and OpenSearch via Grafana---with full access to application source code. Tasks systematically vary report specificity, time-to-detection, and co-occurring fault scenarios. Ground-truth symptoms are curated and signed off by expert SREs, and our LLM-as-judge is independently re-scored by humans (Cohen's

κ_w = 0.91

). Across five frontier agents, the best RCA Accuracy is 25.3% on Medium-difficulty tasks (the realistic-input setting) and 10.0% on Hard---a gap that remains even with Claude Fable 5. The weakest model hallucinates an implausible root cause in 40% of incident reports, and removing source-code access reduces RCA accuracy and increases the hallucination rate for every evaluated model. These results come from a curated 50 GB / six-day testbed of standalone tasks on a system whose code and instrumentation are public. Since real production systems are orders of magnitude larger, more dynamic, and more idiosyncratic, the gap we report underscores the engineering work still needed before agents can be entrusted with production reliability. We release the public set at https://hub.harborframework.com/datasets/orca-bench/orca-bench.

Albert Gong, Kyuseong Choi, Abhineet Agarwal +5

Cornell Tech · Traversal · Columbia University

Software Engineering Agents AI Agent Benchmarks Root Cause Analysis LLM Agent Reliability

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Tycho: Active Abstraction with Programmatic World Models for ARC-AGI-3

ARC-AGI-3 turns abstraction into an interactive problem of skill acquisition. A player must infer an unfamiliar game's rules, hidden state, and goal while maintaining action efficiency because every move counts. We formalize these environments as parameterized rendered deterministic Moore machines and introduce Tycho, a coding-agent system that constructs and uses game-specific models during interaction. Tycho separates actionable observations from intermediate animation, level-completion, and game-over frames. From this structured history, an agent can model, test, plan with, repair, or bypass a free-form executable hypothesis. In one matched public-set run per policy, we compare four orchestration policies on all 25 public games using Claude Opus 4.8 under matched inference budgets. Actor-requested delegation to a model builder obtains the highest observed mean Relative Human Action Efficiency (RHAE), 88.49. With this selected policy, GPT-5.6 Sol and Opus 5 both reach 100.00 RHAE and complete all 183 levels. Their game-balanced first-run human-replay midranks are 98.5 and 100.0. Opus 5 uses 61% fewer scored actions than the aggregate official human baselines. Automatic repair after verification failures produces models that reproduce observed transitions much more accurately, yet reaches only 83.07 RHAE. Transition match indicates whether a simulator reproduces observed dynamics, not whether it has identified the objective or improves the next action. Strong play also requires deciding when to construct, repair, use, or bypass a model. We call this joint problem active abstraction: generating a testable model from costly interaction and deciding when acquiring or using it is worth its cost.

Jens Lehmann, Andrei Aioanei, Sahar Vahdati

Dresden University of Technology · Amazon · TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology +1

Game-Playing Agents AI Coding Agents World Models State Abstraction ARC-AGI AI Agent Benchmarks

Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

Can Agents Deceive? Evaluating Reasoning and Deception in ParliamentBench using a Social Deduction Game

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed as agents in high-stakes settings, such as medical and legal systems, understanding their deceptive capabilities is fundamental to safety. Controlled social deduction games provide a reproducible proxy for isolating and evaluating these complex adversarial behaviors. We present the open-source benchmark framework ParliamentBench based on the game Secret Hitler to evaluate LLMs in scenarios that require deception, persuasion, and reasoning under information asymmetry. We evaluate 16 LLMs across 1,600 simulated matches playing each other, playing against humans, and compare them against a large set of online games. We introduce three novel metrics that isolate social deduction, reasoning, and deceptive consistency. Our experiments reveal that frontier models achieve strong performance across cooperative and deceptive roles, with a strong top-four cluster (GPT-5.4, Kimi K2.5, Grok 4.1 Fast, and DeepSeek 3.1 Terminus), whereas the weakest models fall short of random (33%) and simple algorithmic (45%) baselines. Most LLMs struggle to maintain a consistent deceptive persona throughout an entire game, with deception retention dropping below 50%.

Niklas Bauer, Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Akiko Aizawa +3

University of Göttingen, Germany · National Institute of Informatics, Japan · University of Tokyo, Japan

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Social Deduction Games Deception in Language Models LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks

Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

ClawTrack: Towards Trace-Level Evaluation and Improvement of Real-World Autonomous Agents

As LLM-based agents are deployed in complex, multi-step workflows, a critical evaluation gap has emerged: most existing benchmarks judge only final outcomes, unable to distinguish reliable reasoning from lucky success or attribute failures to specific process deficiencies, hindering attribution in long-horizon tasks. In this work, we present ClawTrack, a dual-assessment benchmark that simultaneously measures what an agent achieves (Task Score) and how it achieves it (Process Score). ClawTrack comprises 320 tasks across 8 domains with 25+ deterministic mock services. A Process Grader scores each reasoning turn along four dimensions (goal alignment, efficiency, information utilization, and result verification), anchored by 12,541 task-specific rubric items. Evaluating 21 models over 16,000+ trials, we find that: (1) process scores effectively attribute success and failure to specific reasoning dimensions, filtering lucky passes invisible to outcome-only evaluation; (2) the four dimensions are complementary, with result verification as the systematic bottleneck; (3) the framework is robust to evaluator choice across different judge LLMs; and (4) process-based trajectory filtering yields consistent post-training improvements across model scales.

Xingjian Wu, Xuhang Zhu, Xingchen Liu +6

Meituan

AI Agent Reliability LLM Agent Evaluation Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Training