# ResearchEnvBench: Benchmarking Agents on Environment Synthesis for Research Code Execution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07095/) (2024)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21798/) (2025)
- [SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13168/) (2024)
- [Multi-SWE-bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Issue Resolving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02605/) (2025)
- [R2E-Gym: Procedural Environments and Hybrid Verifiers for Scaling Open-Weights SWE Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07164/) (2025)
- [Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02824/) (2025)
- [Robin: A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13400/) (2025)
- [SUPER: Evaluating Agents on Setting Up and Executing Tasks from Research Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07440/) (2024)
- [Repo2Run: Automated Building Executable Environment for Code Repository at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13681/) (2025)
- [EnvBench: A Benchmark for Automated Environment Setup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14443/) (2025)
- [Beyond pip install: Evaluating LLM Agents for the Automated Installation of Python Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06294/) (2024)
- [RExBench: Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22598/) (2025)
- [SetupBench: Assessing Software Engineering Agents' Ability to Bootstrap Development Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09063/) (2025)
- [Nex-N1: Agentic Models Trained via a Unified Ecosystem for Large-Scale Environment Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04987/) (2025)
- [Multi-Docker-Eval: A `Shovel of the Gold Rush' Benchmark on Automatic Environment Building for Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06915/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DeployBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Research Artifact Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05238/) (2026)
- [FDE-Bench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Deployment Environment Configuration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27571/) (2026)
- [RECLAIM: Can Agents Reproduce the Claims of Machine Learning Papers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28850/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesis in research code execution. Given a research repository, documentation, and a target execution setting, agents must construct an environment that successfully executes at runtime. Evaluations on diverse research repositories reveal a substantial gap in current SOTA agents, with failures dominated by incomplete dependency resolution and brittle version coupling. ResearchEnvBench provides a realistic testbed for advancing autonomous agents toward reproducible scientific research.