PaperBench: Evaluating AI’s Ability to Replicate AI Research

OpenAI

Evaluating AI’s Ability to Replicate AI Research.

We introduce PaperBench, a benchmark evaluating the ability of AI agents to replicate state-of-the-art AI research. Agents must replicate 20 ICML 2024 Spotlight and Oral papers from scratch, including understanding paper contributions, developing a codebase, and successfully executing experiments. For objective evaluation, we develop rubrics that hierarchically decompose each replication task into smaller sub-tasks with clear grading criteria. In total, PaperBench contains 8,316 individually gradable tasks. Rubrics are co-developed with the author(s) of each ICML paper for accuracy and realism. To enable scalable evaluation, we also develop an LLM-based judge to automatically grade replication attempts against rubrics, and assess our judge’s performance by creating a separate benchmark for judges. We evaluate several frontier models on PaperBench, finding that the best-performing tested agent, Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) with open-source scaffolding, achieves an average replication score of 21.0%. Finally, we recruit top ML PhDs to attempt a subset of PaperBench, finding that models do not yet outperform the human baseline. We open-source⁠(opens in a new window) our code to facilitate future research in understanding the AI engineering capabilities of AI agents.

• Learning Paradigms
• 2025

Authors

Giulio Starace, Oliver Jaffe, Dane Sherburn, James Aung, Chan Jun Shern, Leon Maksin, Rachel Dias, Evan Mays, Benjamin Kinsella, Wyatt Thompson, Johannes Heidecke, Mia Glaese, Tejal Patwardhan, OpenAI