Overview

AI agent benchmarks test systems that act over multiple steps, use tools, and respond to changing information, rather than only answer isolated questions. Researchers build executable environments for settings such as web search, coding, graphical interfaces, games, scientific workflows, and multi-agent coordination, then score outcomes with programmatic checks, expert rubrics, or simulated users. Increasingly, evaluations also inspect trajectories, evidence use, efficiency, safety, and recovery from errors. Agents can perform well on narrow tasks yet remain unreliable on long-horizon work, and results often depend strongly on the model, harness, environment, and grading method.

Latest papers

1,503 papers271 papers in the last four weeks, up 91% on the four weeks before. 1.6% of all new papers.

Apr 7, 2026

EpiBench: Benchmarking Multi-turn Research Workflows for Multimodal Agents

Scientific research follows multi-turn, multi-step workflows that require proactively searching the literature, consulting figures and tables, and integrating evidence across papers to align experimental settings and support reproducible conclusions. This joint capability is not systematically assessed in existing benchmarks, which largely under-evaluate proactive search, multi-evidence integration and sustained evidence use over time. In this work, we introduce EpiBench, an episodic multi-turn multimodal benchmark that instantiates short research workflows. Given a research task, agents must navigate across papers over multiple turns, align evidence from figures and tables, and use the accumulated evidence in the memory to answer objective questions that require cross paper comparisons and multi-figure integration. EpiBench introduces a process-level evaluation framework for fine-grained testing and diagnosis of research agents. Our experiments show that even the leading model achieves an accuracy of only 29.23% on the hard split, indicating substantial room for improvement in multi-turn, multi-evidence research workflows, providing an evaluation platform for verifiable and reproducible research agents.
Apr 7, 2026

Market-Bench: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Economic and Trade Competition

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to manage and acquire economic resources remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce Market-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of LLMs in economically-relevant tasks through economic and trade competition. Specifically, we construct a configurable multi-agent supply chain economic model where LLMs act as retailer agents responsible for procuring and retailing merchandise. In the procurement stage, LLMs bid for limited inventory in budget-constrained auctions. In the retail stage, LLMs set retail prices, generate marketing slogans, and provide them to buyers through a role-based attention mechanism for purchase. Market-Bench logs complete trajectories of bids, prices, slogans, sales, and balance-sheet states, enabling automatic evaluation with economic, operational, and semantic metrics. Benchmarking on 20 open- and closed-source LLM agents reveals significant performance disparities and winner-take-most phenomenon, i.e., only a small subset of LLM retailers can consistently achieve capital appreciation, while many hover around the break-even point despite similar semantic matching scores. Market-Bench provides a reproducible testbed for studying how LLMs interact in competitive markets.
Apr 6, 2026

PaperOrchestra: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated AI Research Paper Writing

Synthesizing unstructured research materials into manuscripts is an essential yet under-explored challenge in AI-driven scientific discovery. Existing autonomous writers are rigidly coupled to specific experimental pipelines, and produce superficial literature reviews. We introduce PaperOrchestra, a multi-agent framework for automated AI research paper writing. It flexibly transforms unconstrained pre-writing materials into submission-ready LaTeX manuscripts, including comprehensive literature synthesis and generated visuals, such as plots and conceptual diagrams. To evaluate performance, we present PaperWritingBench, the first standardized benchmark of reverse-engineered raw materials from 200 top-tier AI conference papers, alongside a comprehensive suite of automated evaluators. In side-by-side human evaluations, PaperOrchestra significantly outperforms autonomous baselines, achieving an absolute win rate margin of 50%-68% in literature review quality, and 14%-38% in overall manuscript quality.
Apr 6, 2026

Multilingual Prompt Localization for Agent-as-a-Judge: Language and Backbone Sensitivity in Requirement-Level Evaluation

Evaluation language is typically treated as a fixed English default in agentic code benchmarks, yet we show that changing the judge's language can invert backbone rankings. We localize the Agent-as-a-Judge prompt stack to five typologically diverse languages (English, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Hindi) and evaluate 55 DevAI development tasks across three developer-agent frameworks and six judge backbones, totaling 4950 judge runs. The central finding is that backbone and language interact: GPT-4o achieves the highest satisfaction in English (44.72%), while Gemini leads in Arabic (51.72%, p<0.001p<0.001 vs.\ GPT-4o) and Hindi (53.22%). No single backbone dominates across all languages, and inter-backbone agreement on individual requirement judgments is modest (Fleiss' κ≤0.231κ\leq 0.231). A controlled ablation further shows that localizing judge-side instructions, not just benchmark content, can be decisive: Hindi satisfaction drops from 42.8% to 23.2% under partial localization. These results indicate that language should be treated as an explicit evaluation variable in agentic benchmarks. Full requirement-level judgments and runtime statistics are released for reproducibility.
Apr 6, 2026

GUIDE: Interpretable GUI Agent Evaluation via Hierarchical Diagnosis

Evaluating GUI agents presents a distinct challenge: trajectories are long, visually grounded, and open-ended, yet evaluation must be both accurate and interpretable. Existing approaches typically apply a single holistic judgment over the entire action-observation sequence-a strategy that proves unreliable on long-horizon tasks and yields binary verdicts offering no insight into where or why an agent fails. This opacity limits the utility of evaluation as a diagnostic tool for agent development. We introduce GUIDE (GUI Understanding and Interpretable Diagnostic Evaluation), a framework that decomposes trajectory assessment into three sequential stages mirroring the compositional structure of GUI tasks. Trajectory Segmentation partitions the full trace into semantically coherent subtask units. Subtask Diagnosis evaluates each unit in context, assigning a completion verdict and generating a structured error analysis with corrective recommendations. Overall Summary aggregates per-subtask diagnoses into a task-level judgment. By operating on bounded subtask segments rather than full trajectories, GUIDE mitigates the context overload that degrades existing evaluators as task complexity grows. We validate GUIDE on three benchmarks: an industrial e-commerce dataset of 932 trajectories, AGENTREWARDBENCH spanning five web agent tasks with 1302 trajectories, and AndroidBench for mobile device control. Across all settings, GUIDE substantially outperforms existing evaluators-achieving up to 5.35 percentage points higher accuracy than the strongest baseline-while producing structured diagnostic reports that directly inform agent improvement.
Apr 6, 2026

RoboPhD: Evolving Diverse Complex Agents Under Tight Evaluation Budgets

2026 has brought an explosion of interest in LLM-guided evolution of agentic artifacts, with systems like GEPA and Autoresearch demonstrating that LLMs can iteratively improve prompts, code, and agent architectures across diverse domains. As adoption accelerates, a central question emerges: given the same information, the same seed agent, and the same objective, which optimization algorithm yields the best results under the same evaluation budget? This question becomes critical when evaluations are expensive, such as when they require human judgment or multiple LLM calls. We present the first systematic comparison of three optimization paradigms -- Elo tournament selection (RoboPhD), Pareto-based selection (GEPA), and greedy hill-climbing (Autoresearch) -- across four benchmarks spanning abstract reasoning, cloud scheduling, SQL generation, and financial QA, all under a fixed budget of 1,500 evaluations. RoboPhD introduces validation-free evolution: instead of splitting the budget between training and validation, it uses Elo competition on training data to simultaneously evaluate agents and drive evolution. All three systems receive seed agents with diagnostic print() statements that evolution can grow, enabling self-instrumenting agents that develop increasingly informative diagnostics for the benefit of their evolutionary successors. Using a single default configuration, RoboPhD outperforms both GEPA and Autoresearch on three of four benchmarks, losing only on the simplest task, where the winning solution (from our Autoresearch adaptation) required under 90 lines of code. On ARC-AGI, RoboPhD evolves a 22-line seed agent into a 1,013-line multi-strategy system, improving accuracy from 27.8% to 65.8% using Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite as the solver. We release RoboPhD as a versatile toolkit under the MIT license with a simple optimize_anything() API for evolving diverse complex agents.
Apr 5, 2026

ClawArena: Benchmarking AI Agents in Evolving Information Environments

AI agents deployed as persistent assistants must maintain correct beliefs as their information environment evolves. In practice, evidence is scattered across heterogeneous sources that often contradict one another, new information can invalidate earlier conclusions, and user preferences surface through corrections rather than explicit instructions. Existing benchmarks largely assume static, single-authority settings and do not evaluate whether agents can keep up with this complexity. We introduce ClawArena, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents in evolving information environments. Each scenario maintains a complete hidden ground truth while exposing the agent only to noisy, partial, and sometimes contradictory traces across multi-channel sessions, workspace files, and staged updates. Evaluation is organized around three coupled challenges: multi-source conflict reasoning, dynamic belief revision, and implicit personalization, whose interactions yield a 14-category question taxonomy. Two question formats, multi-choice (set-selection) and shell-based executable checks, test both reasoning and workspace grounding. ClawArena comprises 12 multi-turn scenarios spanning 337 evaluation rounds with 45 dynamic updates, evaluated across five agent frameworks and 18 language models from proprietary, community-accessible, and self-hosted sources. Experiments show that model capability accounts for a 29-point score range across models while framework design accounts for up to a 24-point range, that MetaClaw's skill overlay reliably improves score without degrading accuracy, and that belief revision difficulty is determined by update design strategy rather than update volume. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/ClawArena.
Apr 3, 2026

Agentic-MME: What Agentic Capability Really Brings to Multimodal Intelligence?

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.
Apr 3, 2026

OmniGUI: Benchmarking GUI Agents in Omni-Modal Smartphone Environments

Current benchmarks for graphical user interface (GUI) agents predominantly rely on static screenshots. However, real-world smartphone interaction routinely requires agents to process transient audio cues and temporal video dynamics that are tightly coupled with the moment of action. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniGUI, the first step-level benchmark designed to evaluate GUI agents in omni-modal smartphone environments. OmniGUI provides continuous, interleaved multimodal inputs comprising static images, synchronous audio, and video clips at every action step. The dataset encompasses 709 expert-demonstrated episodes (2,579 action steps) across 29 applications, systematically annotated with objective multimodal dependency levels. Because dedicated omni-modal GUI agent frameworks are currently in their nascent stage, we select foundational omni-modal models capable of natively processing interleaved inputs to serve as agent proxies for our initial baselines. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current models exhibit competency on visually static tasks, their action prediction performance degrades significantly in environments requiring synchronous temporal and auditory signals. Furthermore, ablation studies isolate specific operational bottlenecks, notably cross-modal interference when processing task-irrelevant environmental noise. The complete dataset, evaluation pipeline, and baseline prompts are provided in the supplementary material. Project page: https://omni-gui.github.io.
Apr 3, 2026

ESL-Bench: An Event-Driven Synthetic Longitudinal Benchmark for Health Agents

Longitudinal health agents must reason across multi-source trajectories that combine continuous device streams, sparse clinical exams, and episodic life events - yet evaluating them is hard: real-world data cannot be released at scale, and temporally grounded attribution questions seldom admit definitive answers without structured ground truth. We present ESL-Bench, an event-driven synthesis framework and benchmark providing 100 synthetic users, each with a 1-5 year trajectory comprising a health profile, a multi-phase narrative plan, daily device measurements, periodic exam records, and an event log with explicit per-indicator impact parameters. Each indicator follows a baseline stochastic process driven by discrete events with sigmoid-onset, exponential-decay kernels under saturation and projection constraints; a hybrid pipeline delegates sparse semantic artifacts to LLM-based planning and dense indicator dynamics to algorithmic simulation with hard physiological bounds. Users are each paired with 100 evaluation queries across five dimensions - Lookup, Trend, Comparison, Anomaly, Explanation - stratified into Easy, Medium, and Hard tiers, with all ground-truth answers programmatically computable from the recorded event-indicator relationships. Evaluating 13 methods spanning LLMs with tools, DB-native agents, and memory-augmented RAG, we find that DB agents (48-58%) substantially outperform memory RAG baselines (30-38%), with the gap concentrated on Comparison and Explanation queries where multi-hop reasoning and evidence attribution are required.
Apr 3, 2026

NetAgentBench: A State-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Network Configuration

As agentic network management gains popularity, there is a critical need for evaluation frameworks that transcend static, one-shot testing. To address this, we introduce NetAgentBench, a dynamic benchmark that evaluates agent interactions through a Finite State Machine (FSM) formalization guaranteeing determinism, correctness, and bounded execution. This provides the networking landscape with a rigorous foundation to measure complex, multi-turn operational behaviors. Our empirical evaluation of four state-of-the-art LLM agents through diverse network configuration tasks reveals stark deficiencies: while agents can solve basic tasks, they suffer severe exploration meltdowns and coherence collapse during expert-level configurations. Ultimately, NetAgentBench demonstrates that systematically evaluating multi-turn behavioral stability is an indispensable step toward realizing trustworthy, fully autonomous networks.
Apr 3, 2026

GBQA: A Game Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs as Quality Assurance Engineers

The autonomous discovery of bugs remains a significant challenge in modern software development. Compared to code generation, the complexity of dynamic runtime environments makes bug discovery considerably harder for large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we take game development as a representative domain and introduce the Game Benchmark for Quality Assurance (GBQA), a benchmark containing 30 games and 124 human-verified bugs across three difficulty levels, to evaluate whether LLMs can autonomously detect software bugs. The benchmark is constructed using a multi-agent system that develops games and injects bugs in a scalable manner, with human experts in the loop to ensure correctness. Moreover, we provide a baseline interactive agent equipped with a multi-round ReAct loop and a memory mechanism, enabling long-horizon exploration of game environments for bug detection across different LLMs. Extensive experiments on frontier LLMs demonstrate that autonomous bug discovery remains highly challenging: the best-performing model, Claude-4.6-Opus in thinking mode, identifies only 48.39% of the verified bugs. We believe GBQA provides an adequate testbed and evaluation criterion, and that further progress on it will help close the gap in autonomous software engineering.
Apr 2, 2026

Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets

Recent work reports strong performance from multi-agent LLM systems (MAS), but these gains are often confounded by increased test-time computation. When computation is normalized, single-agent systems (SAS) can match or outperform MAS, yet the theoretical basis and evaluation methodology behind this comparison remain unclear. We present an information-theoretic argument, grounded in the Data Processing Inequality, suggesting that under a fixed reasoning-token budget and with perfect context utilization, single-agent systems are more information-efficient. This perspective further predicts that multi-agent systems become competitive when a single agent's effective context utilization is degraded, or when more compute is expended. We test these predictions in a controlled empirical study across three model families (Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama, and Gemini 2.5), comparing SAS with multiple MAS architectures under matched budgets. We find that SAS consistently match or outperform MAS on multi-hop reasoning tasks when reasoning tokens are held constant. Beyond aggregate performance, we conduct a detailed diagnostic analysis of system behavior and evaluation methodology. We identify significant artifacts in API-based budget control (particularly in Gemini 2.5) and in standard benchmarks, both of which can inflate apparent gains from MAS. Overall, our results suggest that, for multi-hop reasoning tasks, many reported advantages of multi-agent systems are better explained by unaccounted computation and context effects rather than inherent architectural benefits, and highlight the importance of understanding and explicitly controlling the trade-offs between compute, context, and coordination in agentic systems.
Apr 2, 2026

GeoAI Agency Primitives

We present ongoing research on agency primitives for GeoAI assistants -- core capabilities that connect Foundation models to the artifact-centric, human-in-the-loop workflows where GIS practitioners actually work. Despite advances in satellite image captioning, visual question answering, and promptable segmentation, these capabilities have not translated into productivity gains for practitioners who spend most of their time producing vector layers, raster maps, and cartographic products. The gap is not model capability alone but the absence of an agency layer that supports iterative collaboration. We propose a vocabulary of 99 primitives for such a layer -- including navigation, perception, geo-referenced memory, and dual modeling -- along with a benchmark that measures human productivity. Our goal is a vocabulary that makes agentic assistance in GIS implementable, testable, and comparable.
Apr 2, 2026

MolClaw: An Autonomous Agent with Hierarchical Skills for Drug Molecule Evaluation, Screening, and Optimization

Computational drug discovery, particularly the complex workflows of drug molecule screening and optimization, requires orchestrating dozens of specialized tools in multi-step workflows, yet current AI agents struggle to maintain robust performance and consistently underperform in these high-complexity scenarios. Here we present MolClaw, an autonomous agent that leads drug molecule evaluation, screening, and optimization. It unifies over 30 specialized domain resources through a three-tier hierarchical skill architecture (70 skills in total) that facilitates agent long-term interaction at runtime: tool-level skills standardize atomic operations, workflow-level skills compose them into validated pipelines with quality check and reflection, and a discipline-level skill supplies scientific principles governing planning and verification across all scenarios in the field. Additionally, we introduce MolBench, a benchmark comprising molecular screening, optimization, and end-to-end discovery challenges spanning 8 to 50+ sequential tool calls. MolClaw achieves state-of-the-art performance across all metrics, and ablation studies confirm that gains concentrate on tasks that demand structured workflows while vanishing on those solvable with ad hoc scripting, establishing workflow orchestration competence as the primary capability bottleneck for AI-driven drug discovery.
Apr 2, 2026

PHMForge: Evaluating LLM Agents on Industrial Prognostics through MCP-Native, Algorithm-Grounded Tools

LLM agents are beginning to invoke industrial asset-management tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet whether they can act reliably on this substrate for safety-critical Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is unanswered. Prior benchmarks conflate protocol fluency with reasoning, instrumentation failures with agent failures, and tool use with tool retrieval. We introduce PHMForge, an evaluation environment that closes each conflation. PHMForge ships 99 SME-authored scenarios across eight industrial asset classes spanning rotating equipment, aero-engines, and lithium-ion cells, on public datasets including NASA PCoE, served through 39 MCP-native tools wrapping published PHM algorithms (C-MAPSS, ISO~10816, Arrhenius capacity-fade models, time-series foundation models). Krippendorff's α∈[0.74, 0.82]α\in [0.74,\,0.82] on a 30-scenario stratified rotating-equipment/aero-engine sample; the battery extension is single-rater. Across three agentic frameworks and six LLM backbones, the strongest configuration reaches 80.8% pass@1, with the residual gap concentrated in orchestration and tool-sequencing errors. Crucially, an architectural ablation shows that replacing MCP execution with text-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) over telemetry-equivalent evidence collapses Remaining Useful Life pass-all-3 from 100% to 20% (5/5 vs.\ 1/5) on the battery class, exposing the structural limits of static retrieval for prognostic computation. Trajectory decomposition shows orchestration errors dominate failures across backbones, while schema-invalid tool calls concentrate in smaller open-weight models. Frontier LLMs are stronger at calling tools than at planning when to call them. PHMForge is open-sourced with deterministic evaluators, a public leaderboard, and a datasheet.
Apr 2, 2026

REAP: Automatic Curation of Coding Agent Benchmarks from Interactive Production Usage

Production deployment of AI coding agents requires fast, reproducible evaluation signals. Existing industrial practices trade off speed and fidelity: online A/B testing takes weeks and risks user experience, shadow deployment yields signals that are not reproducible across runs, and public benchmarks diverge from production workloads in language distribution, prompt style, and codebase structure. This paper presents REAP (Relevance and Execution-Audited Pipeline), an automated curation pipeline that constructs production-derived benchmarks from real developer-agent sessions without manual labeling. Such curation, while in-distribution to production usage, runs into several challenges. Untestable prompts, misaligned tests, and test flakiness all compromise evaluation reliability. While tasks can be manually audited to ensure only high-quality tasks remain in the benchmark, this approach is infeasible in the monorepo setting: the build infrastructure state is often ephemeral in large monorepos and requires the benchmark to be continuously re-curated against the current codebase. As manual verification cannot be sustained at this cadence, REAP adds an automated verification layer using LLM-based task classification, agentic test-relevance validation, and multi-run stability checks to ensure the executable benchmark yields trustworthy signals. We use REAP to curate Harvest, a benchmark where each task feeds the coding agent a real developer prompt and verifies the resulting code change against fail-to-pass tests retrieved from production. Harvest's distribution spans more than four programming languages with a majority of tasks drawn from Hack. Model and harness evaluations reveal that solve rates range from 42.9% to 58.2% across five frontier models, surfacing capability differences that inform concrete deployment decisions.
Apr 2, 2026

ToolMisuseBench: An Offline Deterministic Benchmark for Tool Misuse and Recovery in Agentic Systems

Tool using agents often fail for operational reasons even when language understanding is strong. Common causes include invalid arguments, interface drift, weak recovery, and inefficient retry behavior. We introduce ToolMisuseBench, an offline deterministic benchmark for evaluating tool misuse and recovery under explicit step, call, and retry budgets. The benchmark covers CRUD, retrieval, file, and scheduling environments with replayable fault injection. It reports success, invalid call behavior, policy violations, recovery quality, and budgeted efficiency. We release a public dataset with 6800 tasks and a reproducible evaluation pipeline. Baseline results show fault specific recovery gains for schema aware methods, while overall success remains limited under the released authorization and hard failure settings.
Apr 1, 2026

HippoCamp: Benchmarking Contextual Agents on Personal Computers

We present HippoCamp, a new benchmark designed to evaluate agents' capabilities on multimodal file management. Unlike existing agent benchmarks that focus on tasks like web interaction, tool use, or software automation in generic settings, HippoCamp evaluates agents in user-centric environments to model individual user profiles and search massive personal files for context-aware reasoning. Our benchmark instantiates device-scale file systems over real-world profiles spanning diverse modalities, comprising 42.4 GB of data across over 2K real-world files. Building upon the raw files, we construct 581 QA pairs to assess agents' capabilities in search, evidence perception, and multi-step reasoning. To facilitate fine-grained analysis, we provide 46.1K densely annotated structured trajectories for step-wise failure diagnosis. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and agentic methods on HippoCamp. Our comprehensive experiments reveal a significant performance gap: even the most advanced commercial models achieve only 48.3% accuracy in user profiling, struggling particularly with long-horizon retrieval and cross-modal reasoning within dense personal file systems. Furthermore, our step-wise failure diagnosis identifies multimodal perception and evidence grounding as the primary bottlenecks. Ultimately, HippoCamp exposes the critical limitations of current agents in realistic, user-centric environments and provides a robust foundation for developing next-generation personal AI assistants.
Apr 1, 2026

YC-Bench\texttt{YC-Bench}: Benchmarking AI Agents for Long-Term Planning and Consistent Execution

As LLM agents tackle increasingly complex tasks, a critical question is whether they can maintain strategic coherence over long horizons: planning under uncertainty, learning from delayed feedback, and adapting when early mistakes compound. We introduce YC-Bench\texttt{YC-Bench}, a benchmark that evaluates these capabilities by tasking an agent with running a simulated startup over a one-year horizon spanning hundreds of turns. The agent must manage employees, select task contracts, and maintain profitability in a partially observable environment where adversarial clients and growing payroll create compounding consequences for poor decisions. We evaluate 12 models, both proprietary and open source, across 3 seeds each. Only three models consistently surpass the starting capital of $200K, with Claude Opus 4.6 achieving the highest average final funds at $1.27 M, followed by GLM-5 at $1.21 M at 11×\times lower inference cost. Scratchpad usage, the sole mechanism for persisting information across context truncation, is the strongest predictor of success, and adversarial client detection is the primary failure mode, accounting for 47%47\% of bankruptcies. Our analysis reveals that frontier models still fail through distinct failure modes such as over-parallelization, demonstrating the capability gaps for long-horizon performance. YC-Bench\texttt{YC-Bench} is open-source, reproducible, and configurable.
Apr 1, 2026

Proactive Agent Research Environment: Simulating Active Users to Evaluate Proactive Assistants

Proactive agents that anticipate user needs and autonomously execute tasks hold great promise as digital assistants, yet the lack of realistic user simulation frameworks hinders their development. Existing approaches model apps as flat tool-calling APIs, failing to capture the stateful and sequential nature of user interaction in digital environments and making realistic user simulation infeasible. We introduce Proactive Agent Research Environment (Pare), a framework for building and evaluating proactive agents in digital environments. Pare models applications as finite state machines with stateful navigation and state-dependent action space for the user simulator, enabling active user simulation. Building on this foundation, we present Pare-Bench, a benchmark of 143 diverse tasks spanning communication, productivity, scheduling, and lifestyle apps, designed to test context observation, goal inference, intervention timing, and multi-app orchestration.
Apr 1, 2026

Do We Still Need GraphRAG? Benchmarking RAG and GraphRAG for Agentic Search Systems

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and its graph-based extensions (GraphRAG) are effective paradigms for improving large language model (LLM) reasoning by grounding generation in external knowledge. However, most existing RAG and GraphRAG systems operate under static or one-shot retrieval, where a fixed set of documents is provided to the LLM in a single pass. In contrast, recent agentic search systems enable dynamic, multi-round retrieval and sequential decision-making during inference, and have shown strong gains when combined with vanilla RAG by introducing implicit structure through interaction. This progress raises a fundamental question: can agentic search compensate for the absence of explicit graph structure, reducing the need for costly GraphRAG pipelines? To answer this question, we introduce RAGSearch, a unified benchmark that evaluates dense RAG and representative GraphRAG methods as retrieval infrastructures under agentic search. RAGSearch covers both training-free and training-based agentic inference across multiple question answering benchmarks. To ensure fair and reproducible comparison, we standardize the LLM backbone, retrieval budgets, and inference protocols, and report results on full test sets. Beyond answer accuracy, we report offline preprocessing cost, online inference efficiency, and stability. Our results show that agentic search substantially improves dense RAG and narrows the performance gap to GraphRAG, particularly in RL-based settings. Nevertheless, GraphRAG remains advantageous for complex multi-hop reasoning, exhibiting more stable agentic search behavior when its offline cost is amortized. Together, these findings clarify the complementary roles of explicit graph structure and agentic search, and provide practical guidance on retrieval design for modern agentic RAG systems.
Apr 1, 2026

Beyond Task Completion: A Verification-vs.-Conformance Gap in Tool-Evolving Agents

Agents that synthesize their own tools ship a second artifact alongside each answer: a software library that future tasks reuse, compose, and depend on. Task completion (TC) certifies the answer; it does not certify the library. On a Claude Haiku 4.5 pilot, we patch the harness to preserve per-tool source and replay every synthesised tool against a held-out conformance suite. Across 222 preserved tools and three protocols, 96.8% record per-tool correctness C=0.00: two protocols silent-rot at 100%, one at 91.7%. Hand-written reference implementations score C=1.00 on all 16 capability suites. The synthesised tools execute cleanly and the in-session verifier raises no flag; on held-out inputs they simply return wrong answers. This is the verification-vs.-conformance gap a pass-rate benchmark cannot see. EvolveTool-Bench makes that gap measurable. Sessions are structured into seed, gap, variant, composition, regression, and adversarial roles; runs emit per-tool manifests, verified-subset TC, correct-vs.-incorrect reuse, and audit traces for post-deployment monitoring. In the Haiku pilot over five protocols (3 seeds, 8 sessions, 51 verified decisions per pass), TC alone does not separate the protocols; the audit layer does. One pre-specified contrast shows the adapted decision-split synthesis protocol underperforming one-shot synthesis (-7.1 pp, 95% CI [-13.9,-0.1]; not significant after BH correction) -- a hypothesis-generating signal, not a confirmed effect. We release the harness, per-tool source preservation, conformance replay, and reproducibility manifests. An audit schema of this shape -- verifier coverage, reuse decomposition, held-out conformance -- is the minimum a deployed tool-evolving agent should emit between releases.
Apr 1, 2026

In harmony with gpt-oss

No one has independently reproduced OpenAI's published scores for gpt-oss-20b with tools, because the original paper discloses neither the tools nor the agent harness. We reverse-engineered the model's in-distribution tools: when prompted without tool definitions, gpt-oss still calls tools from its training distribution with high statistical confidence -- a strong prior, not a hallucination. We then built a native harmony agent harness (https://github.com/borislavmavrin/harmonyagent.git) that encodes messages in the model's native format, bypassing the lossy Chat Completions conversion. Together, these yield the first independent reproduction of OpenAI's published scores: 60.4% on SWE Verified HIGH (published 60.7%), 53.3% MEDIUM (53.2%), and 91.7% on AIME25 with tools (90.4%).
Mar 31, 2026

Improvisational Games as a Benchmark for Social Intelligence of AI Agents: The Case of Connections

We formally introduce a improvisational wordplay game called Connections to explore reasoning capabilities of AI agents. Playing Connections combines skills in knowledge retrieval, summarization and awareness of cognitive states of other agents. We show how the game serves as a good benchmark for social intelligence abilities of language model based agents that go beyond the agents' own memory and deductive reasoning and also involve gauging the understanding capabilities of other agents. Finally, we show how through communication with other agents in a constrained environment, AI agents must demonstrate social awareness and intelligence in games involving collaboration.
Mar 31, 2026

Benchmarking Interaction, Beyond Policy: a Reproducible Benchmark for Collaborative Instance Object Navigation

We propose Question-Asking Navigation (QAsk-Nav), the first reproducible benchmark for Collaborative Instance Object Navigation (CoIN) that enables an explicit, separate assessment of embodied navigation and collaborative question asking. CoIN tasks an embodied agent with reaching a target specified in free-form natural language under partial observability, using only egocentric visual observations and interactive natural-language dialogue with a human, where the dialogue can help to resolve ambiguity among visually similar object instances. Existing CoIN benchmarks are primarily focused on navigation success and offer no support for consistent evaluation of collaborative interaction. To address this limitation, QAsk-Nav provides (i) a lightweight question-asking protocol scored independently of navigation, (ii) an enhanced navigation protocol with realistic, diverse, high-quality target descriptions, and (iii) an open-source dataset, that includes 28,000 quality-checked reasoning and question-asking traces for training and analysis of interactive capabilities of CoIN models. Using the proposed QAsk-Nav benchmark, we develop Light-CoNav, a lightweight unified model for collaborative navigation that is 3x smaller and 70x faster than existing modular methods, while outperforming state-of-the-art CoIN approaches in generalization to unseen objects and environments. Project page at https://benchmarking-interaction.github.io/
Mar 31, 2026

ATP-Bench: Towards Agentic Tool Planning for MLLM Interleaved Generation

Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously determines when, where, and which tools to invoke to produce interleaved responses for visual-critical queries. To systematically evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ATP-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 7,702 QA pairs (including 1,592 VQA pairs) across eight categories and 25 visual-critical intents, featuring human-verified queries and ground truths. Furthermore, to evaluate agentic planning independent of end-to-end execution and changing tool backends, we propose a Multi-Agent MLLM-as-a-Judge (MAM) system. MAM evaluates tool-call precision, identifies missed opportunities for tool use, and assesses overall response quality without requiring ground-truth references. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that models struggle with coherent interleaved planning and exhibit significant variations in tool-use behavior, highlighting substantial room for improvement and providing actionable guidance for advancing interleaved generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/ATP-Bench.
Mar 31, 2026

6GAgentGym: Tool Use, Data Synthesis, and Agentic Learning for Network Management

Autonomous 6G network management requires agents that can execute tools, observe the resulting state changes, and adapt their decisions accordingly. Existing benchmarks based on static questions or scripted episode replay, however, do not support such closed-loop interaction, limiting agents to passive evaluation without the ability to learn from environmental feedback. This paper presents 6GAgentGym to provide closed-loop capability. The framework provides an interactive environment with 42 typed tools whose effect classification distinguishes read-only observation from state-mutating configuration, backed by a learned Experiment Model calibrated on NS-3 simulation data. 6G-Forge bootstraps closed-loop training trajectories from NS-3 seeds via iterative Self-Instruct generation with execution verification against the Experiment Model. Supervised fine-tuning on the resulting corpus followed by reinforcement learning with online closed-loop interaction enables an 8B open-source model to achieve comparable overall success rate to GPT-5 on the accompanying 6GAgentBench, with stronger performance on long-horizon tasks. Together, these components provide a viable path toward autonomous, closed-loop network management.
Mar 31, 2026

ELT-Bench-Verified: Benchmark Quality Issues Underestimate AI Agent Capabilities

Constructing Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) pipelines is a labor-intensive data engineering task and a high-impact target for AI automation. On ELT-Bench, the first benchmark for end-to-end ELT pipeline construction, AI agents initially showed low success rates, suggesting they lacked practical utility. We revisit these results and identify two factors causing a substantial underestimation of agent capabilities. First, re-evaluating ELT-Bench with upgraded large language models reveals that the extraction and loading stage is largely solved, while transformation performance improves significantly. Second, we develop an Auditor-Corrector methodology that combines scalable LLM-driven root-cause analysis with rigorous human validation (inter-annotator agreement Fleiss' kappa = 0.85) to audit benchmark quality. Applying this to ELT-Bench uncovers that most failed transformation tasks contain benchmark-attributable errors -- including rigid evaluation scripts, ambiguous specifications, and incorrect ground truth -- that penalize correct agent outputs. Based on these findings, we construct ELT-Bench-Verified, a revised benchmark with refined evaluation logic and corrected ground truth. Re-evaluating on this version yields significant improvement attributable entirely to benchmark correction. Our results show that both rapid model improvement and benchmark quality issues contributed to underestimating agent capabilities. More broadly, our findings echo observations of pervasive annotation errors in text-to-SQL benchmarks, suggesting quality issues are systemic in data engineering evaluation. Systematic quality auditing should be standard practice for complex agentic tasks. We release ELT-Bench-Verified to provide a more reliable foundation for progress in AI-driven data engineering automation.
Mar 31, 2026

AEC-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Agentic Systems in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

The AEC-Bench is a multimodal benchmark for evaluating agentic systems on real-world tasks in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) domain. The benchmark covers tasks requiring drawing understanding, cross-sheet reasoning, and construction project-level coordination. This report describes the benchmark motivation, dataset taxonomy, evaluation protocol, and baseline results across several domain-specific foundation model harnesses. We use AEC-Bench to identify consistent tools and harness design techniques that uniformly improve performance across foundation models in their own base harnesses, such as Claude Code and Codex. We openly release our benchmark dataset, agent harness, and evaluation code for full replicability at https://github.com/nomic-ai/aec-bench under an Apache 2 license.