# 1GC-7RC: One Graphic Card -- Seven Research Challenges! How Good Are AI Agents at Doing Your Job?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17046/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 34 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16741/) (2024)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Automated Design of Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08435/) (2024)
- [AutoGluon-Tabular: Robust and Accurate AutoML for Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06505/) (2020)
- [MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03302/) (2023)
- [RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15114/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Automated Data Science: Introducing CAAFE for Context-Aware Automated Feature Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03403/) (2023)
- [FLAML: A Fast and Lightweight AutoML Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04706/) (2019)
- [A Self-Improving Coding Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15228/) (2025)
- [MLCopilot: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Solving Machine Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14979/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RECLAIM: Can Agents Reproduce the Claims of Machine Learning Papers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28850/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous AI coding agents are becoming a core tool for ML practitioners in industry and research alike. Despite this growing adoption, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate their ability to design, implement, and train models from scratch across diverse domains. We introduce **1GC-7RC** (*Single Graphic Card: Seven Research Challenges*), a benchmark comprising seven ML tasks spanning language modeling, image classification, semantic segmentation, graph learning, tabular prediction, time-series forecasting, and text classification. Each task provides a locked data-preparation and evaluation script together with a baseline training script; the agent may only modify the training code, has no access to pretrained weights (with one controlled exception for semantic segmentation), no internet access, and must complete each task within a task-specific wall-clock budget (40-120 minutes) on a single GPU. We evaluate seven coding agents: five proprietary (Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7; Codex CLI with GPT 5.5; and OpenCode with Qwen 3.6+) and two open-source (OpenCode with Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6). Across 5 runs per agent-task pair, we report substantial performance differences that reveal varying levels of implicit ML knowledge, planning ability, and time-budget management. The benchmark, harness, and all evaluation artifacts are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/Strolchii/1GC-7RC-Benchmark to facilitate reproducible comparison of future agents. Because our benchmark design is modular, the benchmark can be extended to new tasks and domains, adapted to different GPU budgets, and used to study multi-agent settings, making it a flexible platform for future research on autonomous research agents.