AI Research Preference Models

AI research agents (AIRA) can now propose, implement, and evaluate their own machine learning experiments, but progress on frontier tasks is throttled by cost: a candidate solution can be written in minutes, whereas evaluating it can take hours to days of GPU time. An agent can therefore propose far more candidates than it can afford to run, and its progress depends on its research preference: how it allocates a fixed execution budget across many candidates. We introduce AI Research Preference Models (RPMs) that predict which of multiple candidate solutions are most worth executing, without paying the cost of executing them all. We build RPMs from frozen pretrained language models (with no task-specific training), in two forms: an inference-only model that reasons over candidate plans, code, and prior executed solutions, and an agentic model that additionally runs small-scale pilot experiments before deciding. We integrate both into the AIRA-dojo search agent and evaluate on AIRS-Bench, a recent benchmark of machine learning research tasks for AI research agents. The two variants raise the average normalized score from 0.684 to 0.711 and 0.729 respectively, and reach the unguided agent's 24-hour performance in roughly 15 hours, using less than two-thirds of its execution budget. Our best RPMs also yield new state-of-the-art results on two AIRS-Bench tasks.

AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents

LLM agents hold significant promise for advancing scientific research. To accelerate this progress, we introduce AIRS-Bench (the AI Research Science Benchmark), a suite of 20 tasks sourced from state-of-the-art machine learning papers. These tasks span diverse domains, including language modeling, mathematics, bioinformatics, and time series forecasting. AIRS-Bench tasks assess agentic capabilities over the full research lifecycle -- including idea generation, experiment analysis and iterative refinement -- without providing baseline code. The AIRS-Bench task format is versatile, enabling easy integration of new tasks and rigorous comparison across different agentic frameworks. We establish baselines using frontier models paired with both sequential and parallel scaffolds. Our results show that agents exceed human SOTA in four tasks but fail to match it in sixteen others. Even when agents surpass human benchmarks, they do not reach the theoretical performance ceiling for the underlying tasks. These findings indicate that AIRS-Bench is far from saturated and offers substantial room for improvement. We open-source the AIRS-Bench task definitions and evaluation code to catalyze further development in autonomous scientific research.