Title: AstaBench: Rigorous Benchmarking of AI Agents with a Scientific Research Suite
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Agents, evaluation, benchmarks, scientific research

Abstract: AI agents hold the potential to revolutionize scientific productivity by automating literature reviews, replicating experiments, analyzing data, and even proposing new directions of inquiry; indeed, there are now many such agents, ranging from general-purpose "deep research" systems to specialized science-specific agents, such as AI Scientist and AIGS. Rigorous evaluation of these agents is critical for progress. Yet existing benchmarks fall short on several fronts: they (1) fail to provide holistic, product-informed measures of real-world use cases such as science research; (2) lack reproducible agent tools necessary for a controlled comparison of core agentic capabilities; (3) do not account for confounding variables such as model cost and tool access; (4) do not provide standardized interfaces to speed agent prototyping and evaluation; and (5) lack comprehensive baseline agents necessary to identify true advances. In response, we define principles and tooling for more rigorously benchmarking agents. Using these, we present AstaBench, a suite that provides the first holistic measure of agentic ability to perform scientific research, comprising 2400+ problems spanning the entire scientific discovery process and multiple scientific domains, and including many problems inspired by actual user requests to deployed Asta agents. Our suite comes with the first scientific research environment with production-grade search tools that enable controlled, reproducible evaluation, better accounting for confounders. Alongside, we provide a comprehensive suite of nine science-optimized Asta agent classes plus numerous baselines. Our extensive evaluation of 57 agents across 22 agent classes reveals several interesting findings, most importantly that despite meaningful progress on certain individual aspects, AI remains far from solving the challenge of science research assistance.

TL;DR: We present principles and tooling for rigorous AI agent benchmarking, instantiated in AstaBench—the first holistic measure of agentic ability for scientific research—plus experiments showing AI remains far from solving research assistance.