mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AIBuildAI: An AI Agent for Automatically Building AI Models

arXiv 2604.14455 ↗First posted 15 Apr 2026cs.AIcited by 10

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents

Abstract (arXiv)

AI models underpin modern intelligent systems, driving advances across science, medicine, finance, and technology. Yet developing high-performing AI models remains a labor-intensive process that requires expert practitioners to iteratively design architectures, engineer representations, implement training pipelines and refine approaches through empirical evaluation. Existing AutoML methods partially alleviate this burden but remain limited to narrow aspects such as hyperparameter optimization and model selection within predefined search spaces, leaving the full development lifecycle largely dependent on human expertise. To address this gap, we introduce AIBuildAI, an AI agent that automatically builds AI models from a task description and training data. AIBuildAI adopts a hierarchical agent architecture in which a manager agent coordinates three specialized sub-agents: a designer for modeling strategy, a coder for implementation and debugging, and a tuner for training and performance optimization. Each sub-agent is itself a large language model (LLM) based agent capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, enabling end-to-end automation of the AI model development process that goes beyond the scope of existing AutoML approaches. We evaluate AIBuildAI on MLE-Bench, a benchmark of realistic Kaggle-style AI development tasks spanning visual, textual, time-series and tabular modalities. AIBuildAI ranks first on MLE-Bench with a medal rate of 63.1%, outperforming all existing baseline methods and matching the capability of highly experienced AI engineers. These results demonstrate that hierarchical agent systems can automate the full AI model development process from task specification to deployable model, suggesting a pathway toward broadly accessible AI development with minimal human intervention.

Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 47 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

Builds on

47 of 85 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026MARS: Modular Agent with Reflective Search for Automated AI Research2 Feb
  2. 2025AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench3 Jul
  3. 2025R&D-Agent: An LLM-Agent Framework Towards Autonomous Data Science20 May
  4. 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering9 Oct

Other references · 43

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31 more
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 10.

10 papers.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

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