MLOps-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Production ML Engineering in Real Repositories

Quoc Co Tran, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Diwakar Mahajan, Kshitij Bakliwal, Avi Sil, Katrin Kirchhoff


Abstract
AI agents are increasingly expected to modify and maintain machine-learning systems in production, yet existing benchmarks primarily evaluate either competition-style ML experimentation or generic repository issue resolution. We introduce MLOps-Bench, a repository-grounded benchmark for production ML engineering. Unlike prior ML-agent benchmarks, MLOps-Bench evaluates executable lifecycle changes inside real ML repositories, spanning data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, model serving, monitoring, CI/CD and governance, and end-to-end integration. Each task is grounded in repository evidence and includes a natural-language requirement, oracle patch, plausible buggy baseline, fail-to-pass tests, pass-to-pass tests, and provenance metadata. The benchmark contains 212 validated tasks from 31 public ML repositories, with 636 fail-to-pass tests and 856 pass-to-pass tests. We evaluate five agents and find that the best system solves 27.3% of tasks while passing 67.1% of tests, showing that current agents often make partial progress but still fail production-relevant behavioral requirements.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1402
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29888–29903
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1402/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Quoc Co Tran, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Diwakar Mahajan, Kshitij Bakliwal, Avi Sil, and Katrin Kirchhoff. 2026. MLOps-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Production ML Engineering in Real Repositories. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 29888–29903, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MLOps-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Production ML Engineering in Real Repositories (Tran et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1402.pdf