DAREBench: Deployment-Aware and Reliable Evaluation of Models as Agents

As large language models evolve from question-answering systems into general-purpose agents, evaluation must move beyond static answer correctness to assess multimodal perception, multi-step execution, tool use, and artifact delivery. However, existing benchmarks are often tied to specific task types, execution environments, or scoring protocols, limiting their comparability, interpretability, and reliability for deployment decisions. We introduce OmniStepBench, a benchmark for deployment-aware agent evaluation across modalities and task complexity. Built on a shared OpenClaw execution environment, OmniStepBench organizes 233 tasks selected and adapted from 22 source benchmarks into a 2×3 workload matrix defined by input modality and execution form, and evaluates them under a unified contract-based protocol with evidence-based score auditing. We evaluate 30 commercial API models and 12 locally deployed open-weight models (42 models in total) over 9,218 applicable model--task runs, reporting accuracy and token consumption alongside reference costs for API models. Results show workload-dependent rankings, distinct accuracy--cost trade-offs between text and multimodal tasks, and competitive but weaker overall performance from local models. These findings support deployment decisions based on workload profiles, deployment mode, and accuracy--cost trade-offs rather than a single aggregate score.