Messier: A High-Resolution Corpus for Cross-Benchmark Agent Evaluation

Stefan Krsteski, Charlotte Meyer, Guillaume Allegre, Tony O’Halloran, Alexandre Sallinen


Abstract
Comprehensively evaluating AI agents across interactive environments is difficult due to fragmented tasks, scaffolds, verifiers, and scoring rules. Unfortunately, existing efforts to unify these evaluations are limited in scale and domain, making costly reruns necessary and leaving available data incomparable. We introduce MESSIER, a unified corpus of 957,611 records spanning 30 benchmarks, 745 agents, 11,891 tasks, and 74,263 verifiers. MESSIER combines public evaluation results with new runs on six underrepresented professional and scientific benchmarks, standardizing their heterogeneous components into a common schema. Using this corpus, we show that frontier progress is uneven across benchmark groups, with function-calling evaluations largely saturated, programming improving fastest, and enterprise workflows remaining most challenging. Counterfactual rescoring further shows that strict all-pass scoring in multi-verifier tasks can alter agent rankings. Finally, we derive capability scores from our corpus that correlate with Epoch’s Evaluation Capability Index rankings at Spearman ρ = 0.84. The scores can also be estimated for subsets defined by domain, occupation, action space, or verifier type. In essence, MESSIER is a reusable resource for studying agent performance at scale, and a basis for designing better evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1398
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
31936–31951
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1398/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefan Krsteski, Charlotte Meyer, Guillaume Allegre, Tony O’Halloran, and Alexandre Sallinen. 2026. Messier: A High-Resolution Corpus for Cross-Benchmark Agent Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 31936–31951, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Messier: A High-Resolution Corpus for Cross-Benchmark Agent Evaluation (Krsteski et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1398.pdf