MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2605.16616 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]
Title:MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility
View a PDF of the paper titled MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility, by Sasi Kiran Gaddipati and 4 other authors
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Abstract:Autonomous research systems capable of generating complete scientific manuscripts have advanced rapidly, yet robust and realistic evaluation frameworks have failed to keep pace. To bridge this gap, we introduce MLReplicate, an end-to-end benchmark evaluating autonomous research systems on machine learning reproducibility. The benchmark was constructed from ICML 2025 outstanding papers reformulated into standardized input specifications and evaluated across 6 state-of-the-art research systems: AI SCIENTIST-V1, AI SCIENTIST-V2, AGENT LABORATORY, CYCLERESEARCHER, AI RESEARCHER, and TINY SCIENTIST, yielding 45 generated manuscripts, with 3 failed experiments. Outputs are assessed using a dual-protocol approach that combines automated conference-style review and structured expert human evaluation, while tracking computational cost, runtime, and the amount of required human intervention. The automated conference-style review accepted 10 out of 37 valid submissions. An additional 8 submissions were desk-rejected before review for failing to meet the minimum page threshold. In contrast to automated reviews, human reviewers consistently identified methodological flaws, hallucinated experimental results, and reproducibility failures across all systems, and 59% of accepted automated reviews contained fabricated or unsupported claims. We further find that neither token budget nor computational cost predicts output quality: the cheapest system outperforms the most resource-intensive system in human evaluation, despite a 38-fold difference in input tokens. We thus demonstrate that autonomous research workflow design matters more than the scale of compute. MLReplicate exposes a substantial gap between current autonomous research systems and genuine scientific rigor, and establishes a practical, extensible evaluation framework for systematic progress toward trustworthy AI-driven scientific discovery.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.16616 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2605.16616v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16616
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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