Data Analysis Agents

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9 papers in the last four weeks, up 200% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 39

Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

From Retrieval to Customer Context: Evaluating Frontier-Model Systems for Voice-of-Customer Analysis

Organizations increasingly use frontier language models to analyze customer feedback, but answer quality also depends on how that feedback is organized and made available. We define a \emph{customer context graph} as a unified model of customer and business context. Typed relationships connect customer objects (feedback, conversations, users, and accounts), operational objects (tickets, support agents, opportunities, and competitors), and analytical or action objects (taxonomy concepts, evidence, insights, work items, and outcomes). This lets an agent investigate not only what customers say, but why, who is affected, what action followed, who owns it, and whether it was resolved. For this experiment, the graph is populated from public Cursor feedback; the same architecture can support any type of feedback source. We compare Agentic RAG, a Deep Research Agent, and a Customer Context Graph-backed Agent on the same 9,432 public Cursor feedback records using 30 realistic product, incident, comparison, and metadata questions. Without exhaustive ground truth, we jointly score responses on answer quality (coverage and organization), analytical depth (specificity and decomposition), and evidence quality (citation support and traceability), using a comparative rubric calibrated on 28 of the 30 questions. We sample cited records against their claims and weight the three dimensions equally. Under this aligned rubric, the Customer Context Graph-backed Agent scores 0.961 overall, versus 0.710 for the Deep Research Agent and 0.651 for Agentic RAG, and leads the Deep Research Agent on 27 of 30 paired questions (sign-test p < 10^(-5); strictly best on 26 of 30). Its largest advantage is analytical depth (0.967 versus 0.642), reflecting more specific, hierarchically developed findings with quantified themes and traceable evidence...

Raviraja G, Viraj Bagal, Prabhath Chellingi

Enterpret

Data Analysis Agents LLM Agent Evaluation Agentic RAG User Modeling

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

DUDA-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Multimodal Data-Driven Urban Diagnosis

Urban diagnosis integrates heterogeneous observations to identify urban problems, localize affected areas, and investigate contributing factors, informing evidence-based urban planning and management. However, its reliance on labor-intensive, case-specific expert workflows limits scalability and reuse, motivating the exploration of agent-based execution. To evaluate this capability, we introduce DUDA-Bench, a hierarchical and interactive benchmark that formalizes data-driven urban diagnosis as a multi-stage agent workflow. It comprises 86 atomic and 22 workflow tasks spanning four analytical stages, grounded in multimodal data from 12 cities covering five urban problem types. Evaluations of seven backbone models and five agent systems reveal a substantial gap between isolated analytical competence and end-to-end diagnosis, with system benefits varying across backbones. Trajectory analysis shows that unresolved evidence gaps propagate across stages, while successful recovery involves revising assumptions and actions using feedback. These findings highlight limitations in coordinating analytical capabilities across stages, particularly adaptive planning, evidence integration, and verification. More broadly, DUDA-Bench provides a framework for translating expert analytical workflows into hierarchical agent tasks and process-aware evaluation, supporting systematic assessment of end-to-end analytical capabilities.

Yizhi Song, Hang Ni, Weijia Zhang +1

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China

Data Analysis Agents AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Evaluation Multimodal Agents

Oct 1, 2026cs.CL

Argo-Bench: Evaluating Data Agents on Enterprise-Scale Workflows

Real-world enterprise data science and analytics workflows require reasoning across dozens of tables, performing statistical analyses, and acting on the results. Established text-to-SQL benchmarks evaluate query generation alone, and audits have found their answer keys frequently wrong. Because real enterprise warehouses are too sensitive to release, these benchmarks are built on public datasets where a business event fits in a single table. We introduce Argo-Bench, an evaluation framework comprising 210 data science and analytics tasks. Drawing on public data, peer-reviewed industry literature, and regulatory filings, we simulate a food delivery platform in New York City at true scale, with 81 million orders in 2024, grounded economics, fraud patterns, and marketplace incentives. We export this world to an ERP warehouse of 235 tables and 7.5 billion rows, modeled on the Oracle E-Business Suite schema. The simulator's ground-truth state is withheld from the warehouse the agent sees, so tasks require reconstructing facts by navigating the warehouse before acting on them. Argo-Bench goes beyond text-to-SQL: the agent files actions such as banning fraudulent accounts, allocating courier incentive budgets, or issuing back pay, and the grader scores each by its consequences in the simulator. Every task has an executable reference solution that demonstrates solvability using only the warehouse. The strongest of 14 frontier and open-weight models scores 95 or higher on only 34.8% of tasks and averages 59.5 points. We hope Argo-Bench drives progress toward agents that understand, navigate, and act within real data environments.

Gabriel Tomitsuka, Arman Raayatsanati, Emma Xing +2

TextQL

AI Agent Benchmarks Synthetic Benchmark Generation Data Analysis Agents

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Towards Reliable AI Data Scientists: Data Agents with Workflow Harnesses

Large language model agents are increasingly deployed for data-intensive work, yet reliable data analysis requires more than general-purpose reasoning and ad hoc tool augmentation. Data Agents, equipped with workflow harnesses, offer a promising paradigm for automating the end-to-end data science lifecycle. This paper examines Data Agents from a harness-centric perspective. First, we introduce a taxonomy of Data Agents and associated data environments, organizing the literature around five functional stages: perception, planning, execution, verification, and repair. Second, we analyze the key technical routes within each stage, identifying 15 distinct approaches ranging from data structure probing to data state reconstruction. Third, we identify four open reliability problems: inactive semantic calibration, missing clarification, missing experience transfer, and the missing verification-repair repository. These problems explain why silent failures can persist even when individual components function correctly, highlighting the need for rigorous workflow harnesses and shared reliability resources. Finally, we summarize the horizontal task families of Data Agents, examine their vertical application settings, and benchmarks for evaluation, while maintaining a companion repository at https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/Awesome-Data-Agents.

Huachi Zhou, Yujing Zhang, Jiahe Du +7

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Jilin University, Changchun, China

LLM Agent Harnesses LLM Agent Reliability Data Analysis Agents

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

StateGuard: Analytical-State Management with Validity-Aware Intervention for Long-Horizon Data Agents

LLM-based agents have shown strong capabilities in automated data analysis and are increasingly moving toward long-horizon, multi-stage analytical workflows. However, as the analytical process evolves, constraints, variables, and conclusions remain implicitly embedded in interaction histories, making it difficult for agents to track which analytical artifacts remain valid over increasingly long horizons and changing dependencies. Consequently, stale artifacts may be silently inherited, propagating errors to downstream stages. To address this challenge, we propose StateGuard, an analytical-state validity management framework for long-horizon data agents. StateGuard externalizes evolving analytical progress into a state graph containing constraints, versioned variables, intermediate conclusions, and cross-state relations, treating each state as an executable, verifiable, and traceable object rather than textual memory alone. StateGuard maintains state validity through evidence-grounded verification and hierarchical intervention. To equip StateGuard with these capabilities, we first introduce Manager-Oriented Counterfactual Supervision, which constructs 3K state-centric trajectories through counterfactual runtime synthesis to fine-tune StateGuard for state maintenance, verification, and repair. We then apply Validity-Guided Policy Optimization, using runtime validity evidence to provide fine-grained learning signals for protocol correctness, state grounding, and intervention quality. Experiments on three diverse long-horizon data-analysis benchmarks show that StateGuard consistently improves data-agent performance while reducing dependency-induced downstream error propagation, demonstrating the advantages of explicit analytical-state management for reliable long-horizon data analysis.

Wenle Liao, Zhao Wang, Jingchao Zhang +3

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence Renmin University of China

LLM Agent Verification Graph-Based Agent Memory LLM Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents LLM Agent Reliability Data Analysis Agents

Sep 27, 2026cs.AI

DISCERN: Can AI Agents Work Like Scientists and Guide Discovery?

Reliable automated research requires agents to vet data, verify analyses, and generate hypotheses grounded in trustworthy evidence, potentially reducing routine scientific workload while allowing scientists to focus on interpretation and discovery. Existing benchmarks often only assess analytical task completion or hypothesis generation separately rather than testing whether reliable evidence supports valid and novel claims. We introduce DISCERN (Data Integrity and Scientific Capability: Evidence, Reasoning, and Novelty), a controlled benchmark on real, publicly available datasets that evaluates three key levels of an automated research workflow. The first two levels test data integrity and analysis verification under confounds and tool traps, while the third tests hypothesis generation and revision under adversarial review, including counterfactual cases in which evidence consistent with real data and documented scientific phenomena conflicts with established expectations, motivating alternative explanations and testable hypotheses. Across 203 tasks, eight life-science tracks, and eight models, DISCERN shows that strong aggregate performance can mask level-specific weaknesses. Agents earn perfect scores in only 60.8% of Level 1, 34.2% of Level 2, and 0.6% of Level 3 evaluations, with penalties attributed to rejection of sound data, failure to carry recognized limitations into conclusions, and wide variation in hypothesis production. Cross-track rankings by token and code use are substantially more stable than rankings by evidence judgment, suggesting greater consistency in computational effort than in evidence-based reasoning. These profiles identify opportunities for supervised scientific assistance, but current agents do not yet demonstrate reliable autonomous analysis or discovery. Code and data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/discern-bench-anon/discern-benchmark

Nan Huang, Mario Tapia-Pacheco, Kun Zhou +4

University of California San Diego · Independent Researcher

AI Agent Reliability Scientific Hypothesis Generation AI Agent Benchmarks Scientific Reasoning in Language Models Data Analysis Agents

Sep 23, 2026cs.AI

TimeEvo: Failure-Driven Self-Evolution of a Time Series Agent

Time series agents answer analytical questions by calling external tools, and which tools they carry is decided by people before the agent runs. However, we identify two failures in this setup. Human-Agent Tool Misalignment: a library of 21 expert-curated tools helps on some tasks and hurts on others, dropping anomaly accuracy under every backbone we test. Silent Harm: one round of generic self-revision changes 147 answers and breaks 56 of them, while the final score moves by less than a point. Both follow from the same gap: whether a tool helps is decided question by question at runtime, while tools are supplied in advance and judged by a single average. To address this, we propose TimeEvo, which clusters an agent's diagnosed failures into capability gaps, plans a measurement for each, synthesizes evidence-only tools that fill them, and admits the candidate library only through a paired admission gate. Experiments on ten time series QA tasks and three backbones show that TimeEvo, starting from an empty library, improves accuracy on every task and every backbone, and that a library grown on a cheap model still gains when it is installed into stronger ones. Code is available at https://github.com/Muyiiiii/TimeEvo.

Jie Yang, Yan Zheng, Jiarui Sun +8

University of Illinois at Chicago · Visa Research · University of Florida +2

Time Series QA LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents Self-Evolving Agents Data Analysis Agents

Sep 23, 2026cs.CL

UniDataAgent: An Ontology-Grounded Agent for Enterprise Question-to-Report Automation

Enterprise data agents must preserve organization specific semantics, not just translate questions into queries. We present ChinaUnicom DataAgent (UniDataAgent), an ontology grounded system for reusable question-to-report analysis that separates semantic acquisition from online execution. Ontology Acquisition and Validation stage (OAV) builds versioned enterprise ontologies from metadata, business knowledge, and supporting materials through expert authored business skills, constrained generation, question verification, and selected expert review. Question-to-Report Execution (QRE) stage retrieves semantic contracts for each question, coordinates skills and data tools, validates results, and produces evidence linked reports. Across 27 enterprise tables and roughly thousands of metric types, ontology construction took a few hours instead of about one week manually. It took just a few minutes to generate the reports, instead of several working days. Ontology grounding achieved 95.0% strict accuracy on real business questions, versus 72.5% for document RAG, especially on structured and compositional tasks. The system has already been deployed to generate cost savings and has the potential to be replicated in other enterprises.

Yutai Duan, Yahui Zhao, Zhangti Li +5

China Unicom Software Research Institute Beijing, China

Tool-Using Agents LLM Agents Knowledge Graph Question Answering Data Analysis Agents

Sep 21, 2026cs.DB

Data Agents: Agentic Data Systems

Traditional data systems face profound limitations in the AI era, relying on human-crafted pipelines, lacking semantic understanding of heterogeneous data, and operating through rigid, reactive processing. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm called the Data Agent, designed to manage, process, and analyze data with minimal human intervention. Data agents autonomously execute a wide range of data-related tasks, transforming traditional data systems by shifting from manual design to autonomous orchestration, from literal manipulation to semantic interpretation, and from reactive to proactive processing. Our Data Agent system includes six components: semantic data organization, semantic operators, agentic pipeline orchestration and optimization, feedback-driven refinement, memory management, and proactive adaptation. Building on this foundation, we also develop two specialized agents: the data analytics agent and the data science agent. Experiments on real benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains of our data agent over state-of-the-art methods. We identify open challenges to guide future research in building fully autonomous data systems.

Guoliang Li, Peiyao Zhou, Xuanhe Zhou +3

Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China +1

LLM Agents Data Analysis Agents

Sep 21, 2026cs.MA

A Task-Oriented Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Wearable Health Analysis

Wearable health questions often combine data retrieval, longitudinal analysis, and health advice over structured records. Prompting a single large language model with a complete record and a composite query obscures whether every request is executed and which evidence supports the answer. We propose a task-oriented multi-agent framework that represents a composite query as distinct intents and typed tasks with explicit intra-intent dependencies. Specialized agents execute retrieval, analysis, and advice tasks; isolated intent states preserve request boundaries and evidence relationships before aggregation. We evaluate the framework on a synthetic dataset of

10{,}000

virtual users with one month of longitudinal wearable records, covering structured data retrieval, multi-intent recognition, and overall response quality. Across

1{,}500

retrieval questions, the Query Agent achieves

98.3\%

accuracy, compared with

97.9\%

for the Direct LLM baseline, while reducing average query-stage token consumption from

6{,}869

to

3{,}136

. On

180

multi-intent questions, the Manager Agent achieves

100.0\%

Multi-Intent Coverage and

94.4\%

Multiset Jaccard Similarity. Under the current synthetic evaluation setting, our method receives higher mean Trustworthiness and Transparency scores on both question categories, whereas Actionability does not improve consistently. These results provide preliminary evidence that explicit task organization can support task-relevant data access and data-grounded longitudinal analysis, while leaving health advice generation and validation on real wearable data as open challenges.

Kunpeng Yang

Renmin University of China

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Orchestration Task Decomposition Wearable Health Monitoring Data Analysis Agents

Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

Skill-based Agentic Evaluation for Real-time Data Science Tasks

We present a framework for evaluating data-science agents on live, continuously updated data using executable ground truth and format-agnostic factoid scoring. Consider this example query: "what were last week's audience sizes"---the reference answer changes as the underlying data changes, so static references become outdated and standard LLM-as-a-judge pipelines cannot verify responses against a fixed ground truth. Our central contribution, ground-truth-as-code, encodes each expected answer as an executable reference function that recomputes the answer directly from live data at evaluation time, ensuring the reference remains consistent with the system it describes. We combine this with a factoid-level, format-agnostic judge that decomposes both the agent's response and the computed ground truth into atomic claims and scores precision, recall, and accuracy over them, irrespective of the response format (prose, list, table, HTML, etc.). The approach is applicable to agents whose expected outputs can be expressed as executable data computations. We validate the framework through a human--LLM agreement study on an internally developed machine learning skill deployed in production, using a synthetic database constructed to reproduce production schemas and entity relationships. Relative to a natural-language ground-truth baseline, our method achieves a 29% improvement in the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC)---a class-balanced measure of agreement between expert annotators and LLM-as-a-judge predictions---and a 16% reduction in token consumption per test case, while a self-directed baseline lacking explicit ground truth is anti-correlated with human judgment. Agents that perform multi-source data integration and computation over non-stationary data are routinely deployed in industry; we propose ground-truth-as-code as a practical methodology for their evaluation.

Aniruddha Tamhane, Raghavendra Addanki, Ayushi Aggarwal +4

Adobe

LLM-as-a-Judge LLM Agent Evaluation Agent Evaluation Data Analysis Agents

Sep 2, 2026cs.AI

MasterControl Seventeen Every Time

We study a governed approach to enterprise analytics: a language model interprets the question, while deterministic policy selects and runs a pre-approved analytical program that returns both results and evidence. We show that this restriction can remain expressive within a defined analytical class, using relational operations plus aggregation, comparison, windows, ranking, and similarity. Fixed meaning, policy, data, and execution rules also make results replayable. Across 440 runs, three 8B models generated SQL and selected tools at runtime, while Qwen3-8B interpreted intent only and policy executed the approved program. None of 330 runtime-planning episodes matched the full answer-and-evidence contract across all test datasets; the policy-executed analyzer matched 110 of 110. This is a configuration-specific result, not evidence that runtime agents cannot succeed under other designs.

MasterControl AI Lab

MasterControl AI Lab

LLM Agent Evaluation Text-to-SQL Runtime Enforcement for AI Agents AI Agent Governance LLM Agent Reliability Data Analysis Agents

Aug 26, 2026cs.AI

BixBench3: Benchmarking AI agents on research-study-scale computational biology tasks

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to accelerate biological research by automating computational analyses. Yet the ability of AI agents to execute on computational biology at the scale of complete research studies has not been systematically evaluated. Here we introduce BixBench3, a benchmark that measures the capacity of AI agents to process raw biological data through to scientific results. We designed BixBench3 tasks to mirror the delegation of work from a scientist to an agent: the scientist chooses the research question and high-level methods, then delegates implementation of all analyses to the agent. In each task, an agent receives a research objective, methodological guidance, and raw data derived from a published scientific study, and must execute a sequence of analyses to achieve the research objective. The data artifacts resulting from these analyses, such as peak call matrices or differential expression tables, are programmatically graded against the corresponding artifacts generated and reported in the original study. Across 20 BixBench3 tasks encompassing the generation of 138 unique artifacts, we find that 13 frontier models achieve scores ranging from 0.00 for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite to 0.48 for GPT 5.6 Sol. Agents perform worse on tasks with larger raw datasets (0.36 on tasks with <100 GB versus 0.10 on tasks with >100 GB) and on analyses requiring more sequential steps (0.36 at 1-2 steps vs 0.24 at 3+). On average, agents use 6.8 hours, 102 million tokens, and $43 to complete each task, with the longest attempts consuming 24 hours, 1.07 billion tokens, and $525. Notably, the highest-scoring agents used fewer tokens and were cheaper than less performant options. These results reveal that LLMs vary substantially in their ability to (1) execute multiple sequential analysis steps coherently, (2) manage large quantities of raw data, and (3) work across scientific domains.

Zane Koch, Asmamaw T. Wassie, Javier Valdes-Aleman +5

Edison Scientific, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA

AI for Science AI Agent Benchmarks Scientific Workflow Automation Agent Benchmarks Data Analysis Agents

Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

DSAgentBench: Can Agents Automate End-to-End Data-Science Workflows in Real Computer Environments?

Real-world data science involves long-horizon workflows that span data wrangling, exploration, modeling, visualization, and validation, and require coordinated use of tools such as notebooks, IDEs, terminals, browsers, and databases within real operating environments. Yet existing benchmarks lack real-computer interaction and do not evaluate whether agents can execute complete end-to-end data-science workflows in realistic computing environments, failing to capture the multi-stage, multi-tool nature of data-science practice. We introduce DSAgentBench, the first benchmark to evaluate whether agents can automate full data-science workflows inside real computer environments. DSAgentBench contains 275 diverse tasks covering the entire data-science life-cycle, reflecting the complexity and tool coordination required in practice. Each task requires grounding decisions in intermediate outputs and coordinated tool use, and includes a deterministic evaluator that verifies analytical correctness, visual outputs, and model performance rather than code-only execution. Our extensive experiments with 15 closed- and open-source models show that even the strongest agent, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, achieves only 56.70% task success, while all open-source agents remain below 1%, frequently failing at tool orchestration, OS grounding, and multi-step reasoning. These results reveal a substantial capability gap between current agentic systems and real data-science workflows, positioning DSAgentBench as a foundation for developing grounded, verifiable, autonomous data-science agents. We release DSAgentBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DSAgentBench.

Mizanur Rahman, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Ridwan Mahbub +3

York University · Nanyang Technological University · Salesforce AI Research

Computer-Use Agent Benchmarks AI Agent Evaluation Workflow Automation Agent Benchmarks Data Analysis Agents

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

DataSpace: Benchmarking Data Agents for Verifiable Analytics over Heterogeneous Workspaces

Data agents enable natural-language analytics over organizational workspaces, where relevant evidence may be scattered across databases, structured files, long documents, and multimedia. Existing benchmarks largely isolate structured querying, retrieval, or open-ended analysis, leaving heterogeneous evidence discovery, complete tabular outputs, and deterministic evaluation insufficiently unified. We introduce DataSpace, a benchmark in which data agents produce verifiable tabular results from task-local heterogeneous workspaces. It contains 410 cross-language tasks and 7,439 artifacts totaling 15.01 GB across CSV, JSON, SQLite, Markdown, PDF, and video. DataSpace also served as the official evaluation benchmark for the KDD Cup 2026 Data Agents for Complex Data Analysis competition. Each agent receives only a question and workspace and returns the complete requested tabular result. We construct DataSpace with DataSpace-Builder, an execution-grounded framework comprising cross-language transformation, constraint-aware relational sampling, modality routing and artifact rendering, and human review and task repair by 11 domain experts. A deterministic evaluator performs header-invariant column alignment, type- and precision-aware normalization, and order-aware row comparison. Across six recently released frontier multimodal models and five widely used agent harnesses, the best accuracy reaches 66.34%, while harness choice creates a 15.36-point spread with the backbone fixed. Multimodal evidence integration and joins consistently reduce accuracy across all six backbones. These results show that DataSpace remains unsaturated and identify key challenges for improving data-agent reliability.

Boyan Li, Zhuowen Liang, Yupeng Xie +11

HKUST(GZ) · Tsinghua University

LLM Agent Evaluation Multimodal Agents Agent Benchmarks Data Analysis Agents

Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

SciDataSailor: Deep Scientific Data Exploring

Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments. We introduce Deep Scientific Data Exploration, an agentic task paradigm in which agents navigate repositories, interpret heterogeneous files and schemas, execute analyses, integrate cross-file evidence, and produce conclusions grounded in executed observations. To operationalize this paradigm, we present SciDataSailor, a framework for synthesizing tool-interactive trajectories by balancing broad exploration with targeted exploitation. SciDataSailor instantiates trajectory synthesis as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with four task-specific mechanisms: difficulty-stratified exploration seeds, dual-feedback first-play urgency, hierarchical strategy-to-tool action generation, and entropy-guided branching. Using this framework, we construct SciDataSailor-SFT-2K for supervised fine-tuning and SciDataSailor-Bench for evaluation, with the latter comprising 627 meta-information summarization tasks and 586 scientific question-answering tasks across 27 datasets spanning the life, earth, and physical sciences.

Jiyong Rao, Yicheng Qiu, Chi Zhang +2

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Tongji University

Scientific QA AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Trajectory Synthesis Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models Data Analysis Agents

Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

CIPHER: A Decoupled Exploration-Selection Framework for Test-Time Scaling of Data Science Agents

Data science tasks span from closed-ended information extraction to open-ended analysis, presenting significant challenges for automation. Recent AI agents powered by language models show promise for handling such complex tasks. However, existing agents typically rely on a single initial state that conditions the entire agent's execution, making them vulnerable to cascading errors initiated by a suboptimal initial state. To mitigate this, we present CIPHER, an automated data science agent that leverages test-time scaling through the generation and selection of multiple initial states for concurrent execution. Unlike existing works on test-time scaling of AI agents, CIPHER explicitly decouples the generation of candidate initial states from their strategic selection for parallel execution. Through extensive evaluation on two benchmarks (closed-form and open-form tasks), we demonstrate that CIPHER exceeds state-of-the-art performance in matched-model comparisons, and remains competitive against larger-model baselines despite relying on a substantially smaller base LM. Our empirical study characterizes the design space of the Decoupled Exploration-Selection (DES) framework: we quantify how generation strategy, selection strategy, and aggregator model capacity contribute to overall performance, and derive actionable design recommendations for practitioners.

Maxime Heuillet, Sharadind Peddiraju

Amazon Web Services

Test-Time Scaling Data Analysis Agents

Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

CausalDS: Benchmarking Causal Reasoning in Data-Science Agents

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as integrated data-science agents, combining abstract reasoning with advanced tool use. Yet the relevant benchmark landscape largely divides into symbolic causal reasoning benchmarks without realistic data analysis or data analysis benchmarks without a principled causal data-generating structure. Furthermore, existing causal evaluation datasets are often restricted to curated examples from existing sources, with diversity coming from limited templatized variations rather than from systematic generation of novel synthetic causal structures. We introduce CausalDS, a benchmark for evaluating causal reasoning in agentic data-science workflows. Each benchmark instance is a scene consisting of a sampled structural causal model (SCM) with generated observational data and an accompanying synthetic natural-language story grounded in a realistic domain. We optionally ground the composition of the benchmark components in empirical distributions obtained from real-world datasets, thus retaining empirical structure while reducing the "causal parrot" risk through completely synthetic generation. From each scene, we then derive tasks spanning all three of Pearl's rungs, with typical data-science prediction tasks appearing as Rung 1. Most tasks include a data science coding component, where the model typically needs to use several tools to arrive at the final answer due to the frequent presence of imperfect observations, which are generated by an observation model. Additionally, recognizing when a question admits no warranted answer and abstaining is treated as a first-class scored outcome. The benchmark thus jointly evaluates symbolic causal reasoning, data science, uncertainty quantification, abstention, and tool use/coding.

Andrej Leban, Yuekai Sun

Department of Statistics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, United States

Structural Causal Models AI Agent Benchmarks Causal Reasoning in Language Models Synthetic Benchmark Generation Causal Reasoning Data Analysis Agents

Jul 2, 2026cs.DB

AgenticDataBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Data Agents

Data science aims to derive actionable insights from heterogeneous raw data, unlocking the value of the massive amounts of data generated in modern society. Automating this process is essential to reducing labor-intensive efforts for data scientists and enabling scalable data-driven applications. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based data agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate data science workflows. However, the field lacks comprehensive benchmarks to rigorously evaluate these agents across diverse scenarios with fine-grained granularity. To address this gap, we propose AgenticDataBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring realistic tasks spanning diverse domains with fine-grained ground-truth labels. This enables evaluations to capture the diversity and complexity of data science workflows and the detailed performance of agents. First, to cover diverse domains, we collect real datasets and tasks from 15 vertical domains, including 5 real-world B2B use cases from a leading fintech company. Second, to remove redundancy in real-world tasks and generate high-quality tasks for domains lacking real data, we introduce data science skills, recurring data-centric operational patterns, and quantify benchmark coverage by the number of skills included. Representative skills are extracted from large-scale task solutions on Stack Overflow using skill-aligned hierarchical clustering. Third, for real-world business tasks, we select task-solution pairs that maximize diversity in skill composition, ensuring broad coverage of practical scenarios. Fourth, to generate realistic tasks for devise domains without real tasks, we propose a systematic LLM-based task generation approach to create workflows and tasks based on these skills. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art data agents using our annotated benchmark and open-sourced testbed, providing detailed skill-level insights.

Zhaoyan Sun, Shan Zhong, Daizhou Wen +10

Tsinghua University · Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Synthetic Benchmark Generation Data Analysis Agents

Jun 30, 2026cs.DB

DA-Studio: An Agentic System for End-to-End Data Analysis

Real-world data analysis is a multi-step process over heterogeneous inputs rather than merely producing a final answer. A practical system should autonomously organize multi-step workflows, execute generated code in a sandboxed and controllable environment, and remain inspectable through visible action traces and intermediate artifacts. Existing LLM-based analysis tools, however, often emphasize isolated subtasks, leaving limited support for complete execution-grounded workflows. We present DA-Studio (Data Analysis Studio), an interactive web-based demo system for end-to-end data analysis that is autonomous, sandboxed, and inspectable. DA-Studio integrates an action-structured analysis backend, a sandboxed execution workspace, and a browser interface for task setup, streamed action traces, artifact preview, code editing and rerunning, and report export. Through iterative action generation, code execution, and feedback incorporation, it incrementally constructs executable analysis steps from raw files and natural-language requests while exposing intermediate results and artifacts throughout the process.

Yizhe Liu, Shaolei Zhang, Ju Fan

Renmin University of China

Execution-Guided Code Generation Agentic Workflows Workflow Automation Data Analysis Agents

Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

Grading the Grader: Lessons from Evaluating an Agentic Data Analysis System

Agentic data analysis systems produce rich outputs, including code, numerical results, and verbal diagnostics. This makes them more challenging to evaluate than single-turn LLM responses. It is therefore necessary to distinguish genuine disagreement between an agent's output and a ground-truth answer from grading artifacts. We investigate how reliably automated graders assess such a system and what strategies improve grading quality by applying LAMBDA, a multi-agent data-analysis system, on 153 numerical QRData tasks from DSGym. We develop and evaluate a three-layer human-AI grading cascade: strict regex matching, LLM-based lenient grading, and snippet-based human inspection, which combines non-GenAI and GenAI strategies with different failure profiles. Both automated graders achieve 100% observed precision (0/70 false positives). The lenient grader's recall is 97% against human labels. A keyword-anchored extraction pipeline raises the strict grader's recall by 60 percentage points over a last-number heuristic; the lenient grader is architecturally parser-independent. An iterative nudge mechanism raises grading run success from 36% to 97% and lenient-pass rates from 16% to 46%; comparing nudging with and without original-question re-injection shows that re-injection offers no benefit, confirming the nudge as an answer template cue. We further observe in this case study that variable type is the task metadata field most consistently associated with grading pipeline dynamics and observed outcome grades.

Tian Zheng, Kai-Tai Hsu

Department of Statistics Columbia University New York, NY

LLM-as-a-Judge Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation Agent Evaluation Automated Grading Data Analysis Agents

Jun 15, 2026cs.CL

VeriGraph: Towards Verifiable Data-Analytic Agents

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.

Jiajie Jin, Zhao Yang, Wenle Liao +5

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China

Data Provenance Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning LLM Agent Reliability Data Analysis Agents

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: AgentBuild for Rietveld Refinement

As scientific workflows shift from deterministic executables to LLM-based agents, the development practices on offer, such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and prompt-and-go, bury the scientist's judgment. We propose treating agent construction as a workflow stage and introduce AgentBuild, which builds a scientific agent from a contract the scientist authors. The contract is a version-controlled rubric, a difficulty-graded curriculum, and a curated external knowledge base. A rubric-driven judge gates a meta-optimizer coding agent that edits the agent within a declared boundary, so the build compiles the agent, not the scientist's judgment. We instantiate this for Rietveld refinement of X-ray diffraction data through GSAS-II behind MCP and A2A, where a blank-harness construction run progresses through a lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) signal-to-noise ladder, reaches the 4 hour scan as a frontier case, and exposes the workflow-scope limits that remain. The same rubric that rewards credible fits also scores trajectory scope, making the frontier a contract failure rather than a pattern-fitting failure. As base models evolve, re-running AgentBuild is a re-tune, not a rebuild, and the scientist's authored contract remains the durable asset.

Woong Shin, Craig A. Bridges, Marshall T. McDonnell +1

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

AI Agents for Scientific Discovery LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents Scientific Workflow Automation Data Analysis Agents

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis. New AI agents can be a helpful tool, but no benchmark exists to evaluate AI agents that automate environmental geospatial workflows through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. The benchmark comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable geospatial API that serves three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate nine frontier and open-weight LLMs, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. Results manifest that (1) Claude Sonnet 4 achieves the highest capability at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed closely by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, while no other model exceeds 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11.6x lower cost; and (3) structured tool calling against a real API provides a more discriminative measure of real-world agent capability, with mean accuracies 25-35 percentage points below those reported on general-purpose GIS benchmarks.

Gabriel Diaz-Ireland, Diego Prieto-Herráez, Mario García Peces +2

Universidad Católica de Ávila (UCAV) Ávila, Spain · Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA · Independent Researcher Madrid, Spain +1

LLM Agent Evaluation Geospatial Reasoning AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agents Data Analysis Agents

Jun 9, 2026cs.CL

TabClaw: An Interactive and Self-Evolving Agent for Spreadsheet Manipulation and Table Reasoning

Spreadsheets and tables are widely used representations for structured data analysis, but effective analysis still requires substantial manual effort and domain expertise. Recent large language model (LLM) agents can automate parts of this process, but they often provide limited transparency into intermediate decisions, rely on implicit assumptions, struggle with multi-table comparison, and repeat similar workflows without adapting to a user's preferences. This paper presents TabClaw, an open-source interactive AI agent for spreadsheet manipulation and table reasoning. Users upload CSV or Excel files and issue natural-language requests; TabClaw clarifies ambiguous intent, exposes an editable execution plan, streams a ReAct-style tool-using analysis loop, dispatches specialist agents for parallel multi-table reasoning, and synthesizes findings with explicit consensus and uncertainty markers. Beyond one-off analysis, TabClaw records completed workflows, extracts persistent user memory, distills reusable skills from repeated tool-use patterns, supports package-style skill import, and upgrades skills from negative feedback. Experiments on spreadsheet manipulation and table reasoning benchmarks show that TabClaw improves executable task completion and reasoning performance while preserving an inspectable user workflow. This paper shows how TabClaw turns spreadsheets and tables into inspectable analytical workflows while gradually personalizing itself to recurring data-analysis tasks. Our code is available.

Mingyue Cheng, Shuo Yu, Daoyu Wang +5

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agent Skill Learning Tool-Using Agents Spreadsheet Automation LLM Reasoning Data Analysis Agents

Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysis

Inference-time skill augmentation provides a lightweight way to improve data-analytic agents by injecting reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters. However, discovering effective skills for data analysis remains challenging, as reliable supervision is expensive and success criteria vary across analytical formats. This raises the key question of how to discover reusable data-analysis skills from unlabeled exploration alone. We propose DataCOPE, an unsupervised verifier-guided skill discovery framework for data-analytic agents. DataCOPE derives verifier signals from the exploration trajectories and uses them to characterize relative quality or aggreement among trajectories. It iteratively coordinates a Data-Analytic Agent for trajectory generation, an Unsupervised Verifier for signal extraction, and a Skill Manager for contrastive skill distillation. For report-style analysis, we instantiate the verifier as an Adaptive Checklist Verifier that derives task-specific criteria, scores reports by verifiable coverage, and iteratively refines the checklist. For reasoning-style analysis, we instantiate it as an Answer Agreement Verifier that groups trajectories by answer agreement and uses self-consistency as an auxiliary signal. We evaluate DataCOPE on report-style analysis from Deep Data Research and reasoning-style analysis from DABStep. Across both settings, DataCOPE consistently improves held-out performance over baselines. Averaged across four model settings, DataCOPE improves the mean score by 9.71% and 32.30% on report-style and reasoning-style tasks respectively.

Zhisong Qiu, Kangqi Song, Shengwei Tang +4

Zhejiang University · Ant Group

LLM Agent Skill Learning Agent Skill Learning Data Analysis Agents

May 28, 2026cs.LG

LongDS-Bench: On the Failure of Long-Horizon Agentic Data Analysis

Real-world data analysis is inherently iterative, yet existing benchmarks mostly evaluate isolated or short interactive tasks, leaving agents' ability to track evolving analytical context over long horizons untested. We introduce LongDS, a benchmark for long-horizon, multi-turn data analysis where agents must maintain, update, restore, and compose evolving analytical states. LongDS comprises 68 tasks constructed from real-world Kaggle notebooks, spanning 2,225 turns across six domains including Geoscience, Business, and Education. Tasks are designed around state-evolution patterns (e.g., counterfactual perturbation, rollback, multi-state composition), with an average dependency span of 11.3 turns. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models, we find that the best model reaches only 48.45% average accuracy, performance drops nearly 47 points from early to late turns, and long-horizon errors account for 52%--69% of failures. Further analysis shows that additional agent steps do not necessarily improve performance, suggesting that the key bottleneck is maintaining a correct analytical state rather than increasing interaction budget. We release LongDS to support research on reliable long-horizon agentic data analysis. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.

Kewei Xu, Xiaoben Lu, Shuofei Qiao +4

Zhejiang University · Zhejiang University - Ant Group Joint Laboratory of Knowledge Graph · Ant Group

Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Agent Benchmarks Data Analysis Agents

May 22, 2026cs.DB

AvalancheBench: Evaluating Enterprise Data Agents Through Latent World Recovery

We introduce AvalancheBench, a benchmark for evaluating enterprise data agents through \emph{latent world recovery}. AvalancheBench improves on existing benchmarks in three ways. First, it evaluates analytical understanding rather than pipeline completion: systems are scored on whether they recover the segments, drivers, temporal events, and relationships that explain the data, not merely on whether they execute a workflow or produce a plausible report. Second, it provides ground truth for goal-driven analytics by generating observations from a known latent world, enabling partial credit for incomplete but valid recoveries. Third, it exposes how early analytical mistakes propagate into later conclusions: missed segments, merged events, or wrong attributions can lead to systematically wrong recommendations. In this sense, AvalancheBench complements real-data benchmarks by providing a controlled setting for diagnosing whether agents recover the analytical structure behind enterprise data. On a first e-commerce use case, the strongest configuration of a leading coding agent recovers only 26% of the rubric, with failures concentrated in generic customer segmentations and merged temporal events.

Darek Kleczek, Fuheng Zhao, Alexander W. Lee +4

Snowflake · Brown University and Snowflake

AI Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks Synthetic Data Evaluation Data Analysis Agents

May 20, 2026cs.AI

Toward AI VIS Co-Scientists: A General and End-to-End Agent Harness for Solving Complex Data Visualization Tasks

The ability to inspect, interpret, and communicate complex data is crucial for virtually any scientific endeavor, but often requires significant expertise outside the core domain ranging from data management and analysis to visualization design and implementation. We present an end-to-end agentic harness that, based on only the data and a high level description of the tasks, independently designs custom visual analysis applications (VIS apps). This represents an important step towards a general AI co-scientist envisioned by many as an autonomous system that can autonomously execute long horizon tasks based on high-level directions. Our proposed VIS co-scientist is an essential component of this broader AI co-scientist vision: a harness that can autonomously analyze data and design visualization solutions using a collection of agents and specialized skills that coordinate exploratory analysis, plan, configure the environment, implement, validate the interface, and most importantly evaluate the overall task completion. Each stage produces document and instruction artifacts that guide downstream work and enable iterative refinement. We validate this approach on IEEE SciVis Contests spanning multiple science and engineering fields. These contests serve as ideal proving grounds because they encode real-world complexity: ambiguous requirements, diverse data modalities, design trade-offs, and task-driven validation. Given only the data and target tasks, our system autonomously produces functional single-page VIS Apps with verified linked-view behavior, highly customized to domain experts' specified tasks and needs.

Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li, Kuangshi Ai +4

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory · Vanderbilt University · University of Notre Dame

Scientific Visualization Data Visualization AI Agents for Scientific Discovery Agentic Workflows Visual Analytics Long-Horizon Agent Tasks+1

May 10, 2026cs.AI

Ambig-DS: A Benchmark for Task-Framing Ambiguity in Data-Science Agents

As data-science agents shift from co-pilots to auto-pilots, silent misframing becomes a critical failure mode. Agents quietly commit to plausible but unintended task framings, producing clean, executable artifacts that hide their incorrect assessment of the task. Existing benchmarks score whether the pipeline runs, ignoring whether the agent recognized the task was underspecified. We introduce Ambig-DS, two diagnostic suites: one for prediction-target ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Target, 51 tasks built on DSBench, a tabular modeling benchmark) and one for evaluation-objective ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Objective, 61 tasks built on MLE-bench, a Kaggle-style ML competition benchmark), constructed so that scoring uses each source benchmark's original evaluator. For every task we pair the original, fully specified version with an ambiguous variant produced by controlled edits; a human-and-LLM verification pipeline confirms each variant admits multiple plausible interpretations with decision-relevant consequences. The suites are analyzed independently and ambiguity lowers performance in both. Across five agents spanning efficient to frontier-class models, we find in our controlled diagnostic setting: (i) failures are silent commitments: wrong-target submissions on Target, wrong-metric or non-committal baseline submissions on Objective, rather than execution errors; (ii) allowing the agent to ask one clarifying question recovers much of the loss under idealized conditions, suggesting missing framing information drives a substantial part of the observed degradation; but (iii) agents cannot reliably tell when to use it: permissive prompts induce over-asking on clear tasks, while conservative prompts induce silent defaulting on ambiguous ones. Recognizing target and objective underspecification, not pipeline execution, is the bottleneck missing from standard DS-agent evaluations.

Josefa Lia Stoisser, Marc Boubnovski Martell, Sidsel Boldsen +2

Novo Nordisk London, UK

LLM Agent Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agents Data Analysis Agents