---
title: "ResearchEnvBench: Benchmarking Agents on Environment Synthesis for Research Code Execution"
authors:
  - "Yubang Wang"
  - "Chenxi Zhang"
  - "Bowen Chen"
  - "Zezheng Huai"
  - "Zihao Dai"
  - "Xinchi Chen"
  - "Yuxin Wang"
  - "Yining Zheng"
  - "Jingjing Gong"
  - "Xipeng Qiu"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2026/48"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/48"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0048.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2026
pages: "419-427"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
  - "Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Applications"
---

# ResearchEnvBench: Benchmarking Agents on Environment Synthesis for Research Code Execution

Yubang Wang, Chenxi Zhang, Bowen Chen, Zezheng Huai, Zihao Dai, Xinchi Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yining Zheng, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu

*Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 419-427. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2026/48](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/48)

## Abstract

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesis in research code execution. Given a research repository, documentation, and a target execution setting, agents must construct an environment that successfully executes at runtime. Evaluations on diverse research repositories reveal a substantial gap in current SOTA agents, with failures dominated by incomplete dependency resolution and brittle version coupling. ResearchEnvBench provides a realistic testbed for advancing autonomous agents toward reproducible scientific research.