DeployBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Research Artifact Deployment

LLM agents have made rapid progress on software engineering and ML research tasks, but these advances often assume access to a working runnable environment. For research artifacts released alongside published papers, setting up such an environment from a fresh machine remains a major bottleneck. Existing environment setup benchmarks do not cover the full scope of research-artifact deployment, which involves multi-language toolchains, system-level dependencies beyond containers (e.g., GPU/CUDA and kernel configurations), and legacy artifact compatibility. We introduce DeployBench, a multi-domain benchmark of 51 research-artifact deployment tasks spanning AI/ML, computer systems, and scientific computing, covering all these dimensions. Each task is verified by a hidden pipeline that executes the paper's designated experiment and checks its outputs. Evaluating five state-of-the-art LLMs with OpenHands yields pass-rates from 7.8%-51.0%. Failures are dominated by a completion-judgment problem: 102 of 181 are agent-terminated self-stops, where the agent's pre-finish checks validate a different or weaker target than the paper-specific task requires. DeployBench highlights the gap between current agents and autonomous deployment, and offers a realistic testbed for scientific research agents.