ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for
  Data-Driven Scientific Discovery
Authors: name: Ziru Chen; name: Shijie Chen; name: Yuting Ning; name: Qianheng Zhang; name: Boshi Wang; name: Botao Yu; name: Yifei Li; name: Zeyi Liao; name: Chen Wei; name: Zitong Lu; name: Vishal Dey; name: Mingyi Xue; name: Frazier N. Baker; name: Benjamin Burns; name: Daniel Adu-Ampratwum; name: Xuhui Huang; name: Xia Ning; name: Song Gao; name: Yu Su; name: Huan Sun
Published: 2024-10-07 14:33:50

Abstract: The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing
interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific
discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about
the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent
to fully automate scientific discovery, it must be able to complete all
essential tasks in the workflow. Thus, we call for rigorous assessment of
agents on individual tasks in a scientific workflow before making bold claims
on end-to-end automation. To this end, we present ScienceAgentBench, a new
benchmark for evaluating language agents for data-driven scientific discovery.
To ensure the scientific authenticity and real-world relevance of our
benchmark, we extract 102 tasks from 44 peer-reviewed publications in four
disciplines and engage nine subject matter experts to validate them. We unify
the target output for every task to a self-contained Python program file and
employ an array of evaluation metrics to examine the generated programs,
execution results, and costs. Each task goes through multiple rounds of manual
validation by annotators and subject matter experts to ensure its annotation
quality and scientific plausibility. We also propose two effective strategies
to mitigate data contamination concerns. Using our benchmark, we evaluate five
open-weight and proprietary LLMs, each with three frameworks: direct prompting,
OpenHands, and self-debug. Given three attempts for each task, the
best-performing agent can only solve 32.4% of the tasks independently and 34.3%
with expert-provided knowledge. These results underscore the limited capacities
of current language agents in generating code for data-driven discovery, let
alone end-to-end automation for scientific research.