MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering
FreeBenchmarking AI agents on real-world ML engineering through Kaggle competitions
About MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering
MLE-bench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of AI agents on machine learning engineering tasks. It curates 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, covering diverse real-world challenges such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. The benchmark provides human baselines derived from Kaggle leaderboards and assesses frontier language models using open-source agent scaffolds. In the best-performing setup—OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding—agents achieve at least a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. The benchmark code is open-source, facilitating further research into AI agents' ML engineering capabilities.
Key Features
Pros & Cons
- Covers diverse, real-world ML engineering tasks from Kaggle
- Provides human performance baselines for context
- Open-source implementation encourages reproducibility and extensions
- Includes analysis of resource scaling and data contamination
- Focused primarily on Kaggle-style competitions, which may not reflect all ML engineering contexts
- High computational cost required to run evaluations on frontier models
- Agent performance may not generalize to non-Kaggle or custom ML engineering workflows