CFAgentBench: A Reproducible Environment and Benchmark for Autonomous Construction-Finance Agents

Abstract

We introduce CFAgentBench, a reproducible, self-hostable environment and benchmark for autonomous construction-finance agents: a CFO/controller-class agent operating across the real software stack a US construction finance team runs - ERP, project management, email, documents, pay applications, payroll, certified payroll, lien waivers, and bank/treasury portals. It contains 1,014 machine-gradeable task specifications across 8 domains and 77 families, every family grounded in a real source; a self-validated subset of 40 tasks (54 with a project-management extension) is compiled into oracle-validated executable evaluators, the runnable suite reported here. Following WebArena, the benchmark runs on an executable environment rather than static traces: 35 mock applications (31 reconciled to one company book, plus 4 PM platforms) over 9 archetypes, each implementing a uniform self-hostable app contract, so every task is graded by functional correctness - a state diff plus forbidden-side-effect checks plus required-output regexes - with an LLM judge used only for reply quality, never as reward. A distinguishing principle is a money-movement guard: 278 instances embed a payment, payroll, e-signature, or e-filing step where the correct behavior is to stop and stage for human approval, and executing even the correct transaction fails the task. The public split (n=711) is sized for a 95% Wilson half-width of +/-4.1%; a private, contamination-protected split (n=303) is reserved for remote scoring. In a first three-model open-weight sweep (k=5), the strongest agent reaches pass^1 = 0.67 but only pass^5 = 0.38 - losing 43% of its successes when required to repeat them under temperature-0 decoding. The within-model pass^1 to pass^5 collapse and sharp per-domain heterogeneity are clear evidence that single-attempt accuracy overstates deployable construction-finance competence.