Collider-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents with Particle Physics Analysis Reproduction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Faroughy, Darius A., Schweitzer, Sofia Palacios, Pang, Ian, Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth, Shih, David
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Faroughy, Darius A.
Schweitzer, Sofia Palacios
Pang, Ian
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Shih, David
author_facet Faroughy, Darius A.
Schweitzer, Sofia Palacios
Pang, Ian
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Shih, David
contents Autonomous language-model agents are increasingly evaluated on long-horizon tool-use tasks, but existing benchmarks rarely capture the complexity and nuance of real scientific work. To address this gap, we introduce Collider-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can reproduce experimental analyses from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using only public papers and open scientific software. Such analyses are often difficult to reproduce because the public toolchain only approximates the software used internally by the experimental collaborations, while the published papers inevitably omit implementation details needed for a faithful reconstruction. Agents must therefore rely on physical reasoning, domain knowledge, and trial-and-error to fill these gaps. Each task requires the agent to turn a published analysis into an executable simulation-and-selection pipeline and submit predicted collision event yields in specified signal regions. These predictions are evaluated with standard histogram metrics that provide continuous fidelity scores without a hand-written rubric. We also report the computational cost incurred by each agent per task. Finally, we evaluate the codebase and full session trace using an LLM judge to catch qualitative failure modes such as fabrications, hallucinations and duplications. We release an initial set of tasks drawn from LHC searches, together with a containerized sandbox and event simulation tools. We evaluate across a capability ladder of general purpose coding agents. Our results show that on average no agent reliably beats the physicist-in-the-loop solution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13950
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collider-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents with Particle Physics Analysis Reproduction
Faroughy, Darius A.
Schweitzer, Sofia Palacios
Pang, Ian
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Shih, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
High Energy Physics - Experiment
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Autonomous language-model agents are increasingly evaluated on long-horizon tool-use tasks, but existing benchmarks rarely capture the complexity and nuance of real scientific work. To address this gap, we introduce Collider-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can reproduce experimental analyses from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using only public papers and open scientific software. Such analyses are often difficult to reproduce because the public toolchain only approximates the software used internally by the experimental collaborations, while the published papers inevitably omit implementation details needed for a faithful reconstruction. Agents must therefore rely on physical reasoning, domain knowledge, and trial-and-error to fill these gaps. Each task requires the agent to turn a published analysis into an executable simulation-and-selection pipeline and submit predicted collision event yields in specified signal regions. These predictions are evaluated with standard histogram metrics that provide continuous fidelity scores without a hand-written rubric. We also report the computational cost incurred by each agent per task. Finally, we evaluate the codebase and full session trace using an LLM judge to catch qualitative failure modes such as fabrications, hallucinations and duplications. We release an initial set of tasks drawn from LHC searches, together with a containerized sandbox and event simulation tools. We evaluate across a capability ladder of general purpose coding agents. Our results show that on average no agent reliably beats the physicist-in-the-loop solution.
title Collider-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents with Particle Physics Analysis Reproduction
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
High Energy Physics - Experiment
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13950