Imaging-101: Benchmarking LLM Coding Agents on Scientific Computational Imaging

Siyi Chen, Jiahe Ying, Yixuan Jia, Yuxuan Gu, Enze Ye, Weimin Bai, Zhijun Zeng, Shaochi Ren, Binhong Gao, Yubing Li, Tianhan Zhang, He Sun

Computational imaging, which recovers hidden signals from indirect, noisy measurements, underpins quantitative discovery across scientific disciplines, yet building a correct reconstruction pipeline demands deep domain expertise and remains laborious even for domain scientists. We introduce Imaging-101, a benchmark of 57 expert-verified computational imaging tasks spanning six scientific domains, each grounded in a peer-reviewed paper and canonicalized into a standardized four-stage pipeline (preprocessing, forward physics modeling, inverse solver, and visualization) Three evaluation tracks (planning, function-level unit tests, and end-to-end reconstruction) probe distinct agent capabilities across the full pipeline. Evaluating seven frontier LLMs uncovers systematic challenges in applying coding agents to computational imaging that go beyond those exposed by general coding benchmarks, spanning algorithm selection, physical convention handling, and pipeline integration. These findings highlight concrete capability gaps and point toward skill-augmented, domain-specialized agents as a practical path to reliable computational imaging assistance.