RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts

TL;DR

RE-Bench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating AI R&D capabilities against human experts, showing AI agents can outperform humans in speed and cost but humans excel with increased time investment.

Contribution

The paper presents RE-Bench, a new benchmark with real-world environments and human data, enabling direct comparison of AI agents and human experts in ML research tasks.

Findings

AI agents outperform humans in speed and cost for R&D tasks.

Humans achieve higher scores with increased time budgets.

Modern AI agents demonstrate significant expertise in ML topics.

Abstract

Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.