CentaurBench: Benchmarking LLM Capabilities on Augmenting vs. Automating Real-World Work Tasks

Pattaraphon Kenny Wongchamcharoen, Kris Gulati, Min Min Fong and Abhishek Nagaraj

No 35663, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Most LLM benchmarks rank models on their ability to automate work tasks. In practice, however, models are often used to assist other (human or LLM) agents. The question that drives model selection is therefore not only which model produces the best output, but which model most improves the work of another (weaker) agent. We introduce a unified framework that evaluates the capability of models to automate and augment another agent's performance. Across seven economically grounded real-world tasks, an assistant model writes assistance text for a standardized lower-capacity worker model, which produces the deliverable. In automation mode, the assistant produces the output directly. Outputs are scored through blind pairwise comparisons by an LLM judge panel with task-specific rubrics, replicated across ten runs. Rankings across the two regimes are only modestly correlated, and the automation winner loses augmentation on five of seven tasks. Assistance is not reliably positive. The unaided worker outranks every assisted condition on three tasks, and only one model's guidance beats no guidance on average. These results suggest that automation ability is an incomplete proxy for assistance quality, motivating benchmarks that evaluate models according to the roles they play in human-AI and multi-agent systems.

JEL-codes: J24 M15 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08
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