Benchmarks as Software: Terminal-Bench and the Case for Continuous Benchmarks
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Coding agents are among the most economically consequential deployments of LLMs to date, making reliable evaluation increasingly important. Yet even benchmarks that are carefully validated at release...
Harness-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how different harness configurations affect LLM agent performance in realistic workflows. It tests 106 sandboxed offline tasks across multiple model backends, recording artifacts, execution traces, and usage statistics to analyze completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior. The study finds significant variation in outcomes across model-harness pairings, indicating that agent capability should be reported at the configuration level rather than solely by the base model.
SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to participant performance. In the arena, two agents take turns as Red and Blue: Red proposes a feature, injects a subtle bug, and must repair it blind, while Blue reviews the pull request without knowing the bug and must pass all tests. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories across five languages showed GPT‑5.5/Codex CLI as the top solver and Claude Opus 4.8/mini‑swe‑agent as the top task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.
arXiv:2608.22510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks often evaluate only final answers even when agents run on stateful runtimes. We argue this under-specifies what is being evaluated: th...
SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to the agents’ capabilities. In the arena, two agents take turns modifying a real repository: the Red agent adds a feature, introduces a subtle bug, and the Blue agent must fix it without knowing the bug exists. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories in five languages showed GPT‑5.5 as the best solver and Claude Opus 4.8 as the best task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.
UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.