AgentDS Technical Report: Benchmarking the Future of Human-AI Collaboration in Domain-Specific Data Science
This addresses the problem of assessing AI capabilities versus human expertise in domain-specific data science for researchers and practitioners, showing incremental insights by benchmarking current limitations.
The paper introduced AgentDS, a benchmark with 17 challenges across six industries to evaluate AI agents and human-AI collaboration in domain-specific data science, finding that AI-only baselines performed near or below the median of 29 teams, while the strongest solutions came from human-AI collaboration.
Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) agents have significantly automated data science workflow. However, it remains unclear to what extent AI agents can match the performance of human experts on domain-specific data science tasks, and in which aspects human expertise continues to provide advantages. We introduce AgentDS, a benchmark and competition designed to evaluate both AI agents and human-AI collaboration performance in domain-specific data science. AgentDS consists of 17 challenges across six industries: commerce, food production, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and retail banking. We conducted an open competition involving 29 teams and 80 participants, enabling systematic comparison between human-AI collaborative approaches and AI-only baselines. Our results show that current AI agents struggle with domain-specific reasoning. AI-only baselines perform near or below the median of competition participants, while the strongest solutions arise from human-AI collaboration. These findings challenge the narrative of complete automation by AI and underscore the enduring importance of human expertise in data science, while illuminating directions for the next generation of AI. Visit the AgentDS website here: https://agentds.org/ and open source datasets here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lainmn/AgentDS .