DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

TL;DR

DSAEval is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating data science agents on diverse real-world problems, emphasizing multimodal perception, iterative interactions, and holistic assessment, revealing current strengths and challenges in AI-driven data science automation.

Contribution

Introduces DSAEval, a large-scale benchmark with multimodal, multi-query, and multi-dimensional evaluation features for assessing data science agents on real-world tasks.

Findings

Multimodal perception improves vision task performance by up to 11.30%.

Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the best overall performance.

Current agents excel in structured data but struggle with unstructured domains.

Abstract

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., vision and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 11 advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, GPT-5.2 is the most efficient, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04% to 11.30%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data anlysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions to advance the development of data science agents.