Data-science and ML-engineering agents are evaluated on benchmarks such as MLE-bench, ALE-Bench, SWE-fficiency and AlgoTune, whose tasks yield a quantity (a Kaggle metric, contest score or speedup). When one stops separating the best models, the usual remedy is a harder version. Re-scoring released runs of eight benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench for breadth, we find much of this saturation lies in the measurement, not the tasks. Most agent benchmarks reduce a run to one pass/fail bit, which fails in two ways. It is too coarse: neighbouring top-ten agents on SWE-bench Verified differ by less than its tests' errors, and correcting them reorders neighbours no more than deleting a random sixth of each agent's passes. It is capped at the reference: ALE-Bench's top ten, separated by contest score, tie when graded against the median human, although nearly half the runs beat that human. On fixed tasks, a higher bar only moves the problem; graded credit fixes it. We derive a clipped log-ratio score with dated anchors and cost as a separate axis. In a Terminal-Bench re-run, pass/fail-tied models differ over tenfold on the quantity the tests discard.
Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by verifying multiple candidate branches in parallel. However, in practical serving scenarios, similar requests repeatedly induce overlapping candidate branches. While retrieval-based methods mitigate this by reusing historical drafts, the resulting candidate trees often contain many low-quality branches as the candidate tree grows, which reduces verification efficiency and wastes target-side computation. To address this, we propose ValuSpec, a plug-and-play candidate valuation mechanism that filters low-quality branches from a supplied candidate tree before expensive target-side verification. ValuSpec introduces transfer-based supervision to align filtering with the target model's behavior. A filtering threshold is estimated from the target model's greedy trajectories on a calibration split, without any parameter training. The target model then verifies the filtered tree under the output-identical greedy rule, so accepted tokens are guaranteed to match standard autoregressive decoding exactly. Experimental results on HumanEval, GSM8K, Dolly, and SpecBench show that, in our main evaluation, ValuSpec achieves up to 2.38x end-to-end speedup in retrieval-based tree settings. Furthermore, integrating ValuSpec into the EAGLE-3 dynamic tree framework yields up to 2.78x end-to-end speedup without modifying its tree construction strategy, demonstrating that ValuSpec serves as a generally applicable and plug-and-play candidate valuation module.