DARE-bench: Evaluating Modeling and Instruction Fidelity of LLMs in Data Science
Fan Shu, Yite Wang, Ruofan Wu, Boyi Liu, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He, Feng Yan · Feb 27, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Moderate trustUse this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.
Evidence quality
Moderate
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
The fast-growing demands in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex multi-step data science tasks create an emergent need for accurate benchmarking. There are two major gaps in existing benchmarks: (i) the lack of standardized, process-aware evaluation that captures instruction adherence and process fidelity, and (ii) the scarcity of accurately labeled training data. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DARE-bench, a benchmark designed for machine learning modeling and data science instruction following. Unlike many existing benchmarks that rely on human- or model-based judges, all tasks in DARE-bench have verifiable ground truth, ensuring objective and reproducible evaluation. To cover a broad range of tasks and support agentic tools, DARE-bench consists of 6,300 Kaggle-derived tasks and provides both large-scale training data and evaluation sets. Extensive evaluations show that even highly capable models such as gpt-o4-mini struggle to achieve good performance, especially in machine learning modeling tasks. Using DARE-bench training tasks for fine-tuning can substantially improve model performance. For example, supervised fine-tuning boosts Qwen3-32B's accuracy by 1.83x and reinforcement learning boosts Qwen3-4B's accuracy by more than 8x. These significant improvements verify the importance of DARE-bench both as an accurate evaluation benchmark and critical training data.