DeltaML-Bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Real-World Research Repositories
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:DeltaML-Bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Real-World Research Repositories
Abstract:Autonomous agents for machine learning experimentation must navigate heterogeneous repositories, repair training pipelines, and evaluate candidate improvements under realistic compute constraints. Existing benchmarks only partially capture these conditions. We introduce DeltaML-Bench, a benchmark comprising 48 tasks sourced from research papers that require agents to improve published baselines within imperfect, open-source repositories. We evaluate GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4 with a standard Modular agent and a search-based ARG scaffolding. In the 4 x 6h allocation, ARG raises GPT-5's per-run success rate from 9.4% to 33.9%; in the 2 x 12h allocation, GPT-5 ARG reaches 49.0%. Modular configurations exhibit specification gaming rates as high as 47.9%, while no gaming is observed in the evaluated ARG configurations. These results indicate that scaffolding design and integrity checks are important considerations when deploying agents for autonomous ML experimentation.
| Comments: | 18 pages, 3 figures, 12 tables. Code and benchmark: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.19653 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2608.19653v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.19653
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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