Publications as benchmarks: auditing AI agents on spatial transcriptomics alignment

AI agents are increasingly automating data analysis, but responsible adoption requires reliable performance evaluation, which is costly in specialized scientific domains. We introduce a framework that translates scientific publications into auditable benchmarks for AI agents and demonstrate its use on spatial transcriptomics alignment tasks. Across 121 tasks, 16 baseline methods, and six AI agents, the best agents (GPT-6-Astra and Gemini-4-Argon) matched or outperformed all baselines on 80% of tasks, often using surprisingly simple heuristics. Agent performance was robust to prompting and access to pre-installed packages. Benchmark construction also uncovered errors in prior work and shortcuts in current evaluation metrics. Finally, we show that agent-generated solutions can be distilled into a reusable program that ranks in the top 10% of baseline methods on unseen data. Our framework offers a scalable way to evaluate AI agents in specialized scientific domains by leveraging and stress-testing existing papers and metrics.