MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility

TL;DR

MLReplicate is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating autonomous research systems in machine learning, revealing significant gaps in scientific rigor and reproducibility despite advances in automation.

Contribution

This paper introduces MLReplicate, the first standardized, end-to-end benchmark for assessing the reproducibility and scientific validity of autonomous research systems.

Findings

Automated reviews accepted 10 out of 37 submissions.

Human reviewers identified flaws and unsupported claims in all systems.

Cost and token usage do not predict output quality.

Abstract

Autonomous research systems capable of generating complete scientific manuscripts have advanced rapidly, yet robust and realistic evaluation frameworks have failed to keep pace. To bridge this gap, we introduce MLReplicate, an end-to-end benchmark evaluating autonomous research systems on machine learning reproducibility. The benchmark was constructed from ICML 2025 outstanding papers reformulated into standardized input specifications and evaluated across 6 state-of-the-art research systems: AI SCIENTIST-V1, AI SCIENTIST-V2, AGENT LABORATORY, CYCLERESEARCHER, AI RESEARCHER, and TINY SCIENTIST, yielding 45 generated manuscripts, with 3 failed experiments. Outputs are assessed using a dual-protocol approach that combines automated conference-style review and structured expert human evaluation, while tracking computational cost, runtime, and the amount of required human intervention. The automated conference-style review accepted 10 out of 37 valid submissions. An additional 8 submissions were desk-rejected before review for failing to meet the minimum page threshold. In contrast to automated reviews, human reviewers consistently identified methodological flaws, hallucinated experimental results, and reproducibility failures across all systems, and 59% of accepted automated reviews contained fabricated or unsupported claims. We further find that neither token budget nor computational cost predicts output quality: the cheapest system outperforms the most resource-intensive system in human evaluation, despite a 38-fold difference in input tokens. We thus demonstrate that autonomous research workflow design matters more than the scale of compute. MLReplicate exposes a substantial gap between current autonomous research systems and genuine scientific rigor, and establishes a practical, extensible evaluation framework for systematic progress toward trustworthy AI-driven scientific discovery.