Infrathon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Real-World, Long-Horizon AI Infra Optimization
Abstract
In this work, we study whether frontier agent can continually improve real-world AI infrastructure over long horizons. We introduce Infrathon, a benchmark of diverse, long-horizon AI infrastructure optimization tasks across different levels. We evaluate six models across 150 runs with 24-hour budgets, totaling over 10,000 GPU-hours. Our results show that model rankings vary with the evaluation horizon, while 135 of the 150 runs achieve further improvements during the second half of their budgets. These findings indicate that shorter evaluations can overlook both optimization gains and changes in relative model performance. We also find agents can discover solutions that outperform human-designed baselines: Claude Opus 5.5 increases the mean KV-cache compression ratio from 6.82% with the human-designed Quant-VideoGen codec to 19.86%. Analysis of agent trajectories identifies task violations, unreliable testing, and premature completion as barriers to sustained improvement. Together, Our Infrathon framework provide resources for constructing long-horizon tasks, evaluating frontier agents, and discovering good infrastructure solutions.
Community
In this work, we study whether frontier agent can continually improve real-world AI infrastructure over long horizons. We introduce Infrathon, a benchmark of diverse, long-horizon AI infrastructure optimization tasks across different levels. We evaluate six models across 150 runs with 24-hour budgets, totaling over 10,000 GPU-hours. Our results show that model rankings vary with the evaluation horizon, while 135 of the 150 runs achieve further improvements during the second half of their budgets. These findings indicate that shorter evaluations can overlook both optimization gains and changes in relative model performance. We also find agents can discover solutions that outperform human-designed baselines: Claude Opus 5.5 increases the mean KV-cache compression ratio from 6.82% with the human-designed Quant-VideoGen codec to 19.86%. Analysis of agent trajectories identifies task violations, unreliable testing, and premature completion as barriers to sustained improvement. Together, Our Infrathon framework provide resources for constructing long-horizon tasks, evaluating frontier agents, and discovering good infrastructure solutions.
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Rankings changing with the evaluation horizon is the finding I keep thinking about: a model that looks fine after an hour may not after twenty-four. 135 of 150 runs still improving in the second half is striking too. Did the task violations and premature completion cluster in particular models, or show up everywhere?
We saw both behaviors across multiple models, including the top performers. Our task-violation examples involve Claude, DeepSeek, and GLM submitting solutions that broke task instructions. For premature completion, selected runs with GPT-6 Astra, DeepSeek, and GLM improved by another 7.3%, 14.0%, and 24.8%, respectively, after our stop hook prompted them to continue, all within the original budget.
We’ll follow up with more detailed, systematic statistics on how often these behaviors occur in each model.
What stood out was that agents could declare completion while substantial improvements were still possible, even with time remaining.
Thank you for raising this question!
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