Automated Benchmark Auditing for AI Agents and Large Language Models
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
Abstract (arXiv)
Modern AI benchmarks operate at a complexity that outpaces traditional verification methods. Tasks authored by domain experts often contain implicit assumptions, incomplete environment specifications, and brittle evaluation logic that human annotation cannot reliably catch. We introduce Auto Benchmark Audit (ABA), an agentic framework that systematically audits individual benchmark tasks, uncovering issues such as hidden environment dependencies, specification gaps, and limited grading logic. We run ABA on a collection of frontier LLM benchmarks and previous NeurIPS publications, totaling 168 benchmarks across nine domains. Across this corpus, ABA identifies critical issues including ambiguous task design, execution environment conflicts, and incorrect ground truths in over 25.7% of the evaluated tasks. The precision of these automated audits is validated by expert review and independent third-party reports such as upstream PRs. Crucially, we demonstrate that these problematic tasks severely distorts capability assessments for agents and LLMs: filtering out these tasks with issues shifts model rankings and increases average performance on SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2 by 9.9% and 9.6%, respectively. We release the agentic tool and all task annotations to support the future development of frontier benchmarks.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 46 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.
Builds on
46 of 85 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2026BenchGuard: Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks27 Apr
- 2025The Tool Decathlon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Diverse, Realistic, and Long-Horizon Task Execution29 Oct
- 2025Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks3 Jul
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains17 Jun
- 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents7 Aug
Other references · 41
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
- 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,879
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
- 2022Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language modelscited by 1,998
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
- 2024Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preferencecited by 1,184
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
- 2023Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLscited by 688
- 2018Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Datacited by 671
29 more
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- 2024MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmarkcited by 512
- 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 491
- 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 438
- 2025SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?cited by 279
- 2024FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced Mathematical Reasoning in AIcited by 243
- 2024ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discoverycited by 235
- 2025KernelBench: Can LLMs Write Efficient GPU Kernels?cited by 225
- 2024Are We Done with MMLU?cited by 194
- 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 164
- 2025GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Taskscited by 158
- 2024BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practicescited by 114
- 2025SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn 1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?cited by 105
- 2024SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMscited by 99
- 2025CVE-Bench: A Benchmark for AI Agents' Ability to Exploit Real-World Web Application Vulnerabilitiescited by 96
- 2025BixBench: a Comprehensive Benchmark for LLM-based Agents in Computational Biologycited by 89
- 2025Towards Robust Mathematical Reasoningcited by 73
- 2025Finance Agent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLMs on Real-world Financial Research Taskscited by 65
- 2024Introducing v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark from MLCommonscited by 62
- 2025Do Large Language Model Benchmarks Test Reliability?cited by 54
- 2025DABstep: Data Agent Benchmark for Multi-step Reasoningcited by 46
- 2025UTBoost: Rigorous Evaluation of Coding Agents on SWE-Benchcited by 45
- 2020Realistic Re-evaluation of Knowledge Graph Completion Methods: An Experimental Studycited by 37
- 2025Saving SWE-Bench: A Benchmark Mutation Approach for Realistic Agent Evaluationcited by 15
- 2026DSGym: A Holistic Framework for Evaluating and Training Data Science Agentscited by 15
- 2025ReasonIF: Large Reasoning Models Fail to Follow Instructions During Reasoningcited by 13
- 2025When Judgment Becomes Noise: How Design Failures in LLM Judge Benchmarks Silently Undermine Validitycited by 11
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.
12 papers.
- 2026Building to the Test: Coding Agents Deliver What You Check, Not What You Requestedcited by 4
- 2026Do Agent Benchmarks Do What They Say? An Executable-Contract Audit of Tool-Using Agent Environmentscited by 2
- 2026Automated Transcript Analysis for Detecting Flaws in Agentic Benchmarkscited by 1
- 2026BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructurecited by 1
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separationcited by 0
- 2026Ignorance or Incompetence? Constructing Knowledge-Gated, Verifiable Tasks for LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026MLIP Detective: Active Failure Mode Discovery Beyond Benchmark Scores for Machine-Learning Interatomic Potentialscited by 0
- 2026Coding Agents Have Converged: Why the SWE-bench Leaderboard Can No Longer Order Its Top Entries, and What to Measure Insteadcited by 0
- 2026One to More, More to One: Category-Aware Iterative Expert Training for Software Engineering Agentscited by 0
- 2026Are Benchmarks Reliable? Toward Structural Diagnosis via Item-Level Capability Boundariescited by 0
- 2026What Did the Agent Actually Do? Evidence-Grounded Oversight for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 0
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026TestJack: Should you trust the results in coding benchmarks? Agentic Coding Benchmarks Auditing via Evaluator Evolution7 Oct 2026
- 2026What Did the Agent Actually Do? Evidence-Grounded Oversight for Long-Horizon Agents5 Oct 2026
- 2026Do Agent Benchmarks Do What They Say? An Executable-Contract Audit of Tool-Using Agent Environments29 Sep 2026
- 2026Are Benchmarks Reliable? Toward Structural Diagnosis via Item-Level Capability Boundaries27 Sep 2026
- 2026One to More, More to One: Category-Aware Iterative Expert Training for Software Engineering Agents20 Sep 2026
- 2026Coding Agents Have Converged: Why the SWE-bench Leaderboard Can No Longer Order Its Top Entries, and What to Measure Instead15 Sep 2026
- 2026BenchShield: Formal Model-Backed Instrumentation for Reward Integrity in LLM-Agent Evaluation Infrastructure10 Sep 2026
- 2026MLIP Detective: Active Failure Mode Discovery Beyond Benchmark Scores for Machine-Learning Interatomic Potentials8 Sep 2026
- 2026Ignorance or Incompetence? Constructing Knowledge-Gated, Verifiable Tasks for LLM Agents31 Aug 2026
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separation14 Aug 2026
- 2026Automated Transcript Analysis for Detecting Flaws in Agentic Benchmarks29 Jul 2026
- 2026Building to the Test: Coding Agents Deliver What You Check, Not What You Requested26 Jun 2026
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- 2026What Makes a Good Terminal-Agent Benchmark Task: A Guideline for Adversarial, Difficult, and Legible Evaluation Design