Benjamin Cheng

Yiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang et al.

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.

Ryan Ford, Kenneth Hutchison, Nicholas Felts et al.

Understanding the impact of data set design on model training and performance can help alleviate the costs associated with generating remote sensing and overhead labeled data. This work examined the impact of training shifted window transformers using bounding boxes and segmentation labels, where the latter are more expensive to produce. We examined classification tasks by comparing models trained with both target and backgrounds against models trained with only target pixels, extracted by segmentation labels. For object detection models, we compared performance using either label type when training. We found that the models trained on only target pixels do not show performance improvement for classification tasks, appearing to conflate background pixels in the evaluation set with target pixels. For object detection, we found that models trained with either label type showed equivalent performance across testing. We found that bounding boxes appeared to be sufficient for tasks that did not require more complex labels, such as object segmentation. Continuing work to determine consistency of this result across data types and model architectures could potentially result in substantial savings in generating remote sensing data sets for deep learning.