intology@intology8h ago

We are releasing AutoResearchExam, a benchmark on open-ended machine learning and engineering tasks. Our benchmark covers seven research areas including model training, data curation, AI safety and interpretability. https://t.co/Rho35ULgS5 In each task, we give agents 24 hours with a CPU or GPU machine to develop and improve their solutions through experiments and feedback. We measure both speed and quality with a combined score. Our benchmark has a unique feature: testing if agents create improvements that hold up on data they never see. We find that AI research agents often overfit as they try to improve. We see an interesting head-to-head comparison at the frontier: Astra starts the strongest and holds the lead for up to 19 hours but Fable 5.1 catches up and gets the top performing spot in the final hours. Qwen3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash and Grok 4.6 all sit on the cost-performance Pareto frontier, giving strong options at lower API budgets. Anthropic's Opus and Fable retain nearly all their validation performance on hidden tests, with gaps of 1.1% and 2.9%. Astra's improvement over Sol extends to generalization too, with that gap falling from 6.9% to 1.7%. (1/n)