Category

Research

Snorkel AI emerged from a research project, and we remain closely connected to the research community. Students and professors associated with the Snorkel project continue to publish academic papers that push the field forward, and the Snorkel AI research team integrates the most promising of those ideas into our platform.

Our picks

Image for Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
Getting better performance from foundation models (with less data)
August 4, 2023
Fred Sala
Image for Snorkel AI researchers present 18 papers at NeurIPS 2023
Snorkel AI researchers present 18 papers at NeurIPS 2023
The Snorkel AI team will present 18 research papers and talks at the 2023 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference from December 10-16. The Snorkel papers cover a broad range of topics including fairness, semi-supervised learning, large language models (LLMs), and domain-specific models. Snorkel AI is proud of its roots in the research community and endeavors to remain at the forefront
October 31, 2023
Team Snorkel
Image for Long context models in the enterprise: benchmarks and beyond
Long context models in the enterprise: benchmarks and beyond
Snorkel researchers devised a new way to evaluate long context models and address their “lost-in-the-middle” challenges with mediod voting.
June 6, 2024
Amanda Dsouza

All articles on Research

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Building FinQA: An Open RL Environment for Financial Reasoning Agents
TL;DR: We built FinQA — a financial question-answering environment with 290 expert-curated questions across 22 public companies, now available on OpenEnv. Agents use MCP tools to discover schemas, write constrained SQL queries, and answer multi-step questions from real SEC 10-K filings. Most open-source models struggle with this kind of multi-step tool use, and even frontier closed-source models, while more accurate,
March 30, 2026
Bhavishya Pohani
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How Tool Discipline Let a 4B Model Outsmart a 235B Giant on Financial Tasks
The Snorkel research team collaborated with the rLLM team at UC Berkeley on the Agentica project, using their open-source rLLM framework to fine-tune Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, delivering a model that beats Qwen3-235B-A22B on Snorkel AI’s expert-curated financial benchmarks – at 1/60th the size. A full breakdown of the results are published in the rLLM blog here. The key insight? Just focus on
February 17, 2026
Chris Glaze
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Closing the Evaluation Gap in Agentic AI
Announcing a $3M commitment to launch Open Benchmarks Grants Today, AI is marked by a growing asymmetry: the excitement around agentic AI is real—backed by quantitative progress on model cards and genuine leaps forward, especially in coding. But ask individuals or enterprises where they feel ready to deploy agentic automation in high-stakes, domain-specific settings outside of coding… and you will
February 11, 2026
Vincent Sunn Chen
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Part V: Future direction and emerging trends
Explores how rubrics support agentic, multi-turn, tool-using, multimodal, and code-generating AI systems, and how they evolve with AI feedback and ensemble evaluation.
December 5, 2025
Justin Bauer
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Chat with the Terminal-Bench team
Snorkel Chief Scientist Fred Sala and Kobie Crawford chat with the Terminal-Bench team to unpack the design behind Terminal-Bench 2.0 and the new Harbor framework.
November 19, 2025
Fred Sala
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Kobie Crawford
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Intelligence Per Watt: A New Metric for AI’s Future
Snorkel AI contributes specialized datasets to Hazy Research’s “Intelligence-per-Watt” study, advancing how efficiently AI turns energy into intelligence.
November 12, 2025
Kobie Crawford
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Snorkeling in RL environments
We unpack what makes a high-quality RL environment for LLMs and show how we build realistic, enterprise-grade environments at Snorkel AI.
November 4, 2025
Armin Parchami
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Introducing SnorkelSpatial
A procedurally generated and programmatically verified benchmark for evaluating spatial reasoning capabilities in LLMs Large language models (LLMs) are showing remarkable results on solving complex reasoning problems across domains—from mathematical proofs and logical puzzles to graduate-level science and engineering questions. On the other hand, their spatial reasoning capabilities are less understood, even though such reasoning underlies many everyday tasks. We
October 24, 2025
Harit Vishwakarma
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Scaling Trust: Rubrics in Snorkel’s Quality Process
Snorkel’s “Trusted Scale” philosophy Welcome to Part 4 of Snorkel AI’s rubric series. In previous posts, we explored how rubrics enable structured evaluation (Part 1), the spectrum of rubric types and use cases (Part 2), and the science behind designing and validating them (Part 3). In this latest installment, we pull back the curtain on how Snorkel puts these principles
October 16, 2025
Derek Pham
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Evaluating Multi-Agent Systems in Enterprise Tool Use
In recent months, there has been increasing interest in the area of multi-agent systems and how they can be used to solve more complex tasks than a single agent could accomplish on its own. The topic is particularly interesting and raises several questions and ideas to consider: Anthropic’s blog post about how they architected a multi-agent deep research system is
October 9, 2025
Bhavishya Pohani
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Evaluating Coding Agent Capabilities with Terminal-Bench: Snorkel’s Role in Building the Next Generation Benchmark
Terminal-Bench, developed through a collaboration between Stanford University and Laude Institute, has quickly become the gold standard benchmark for evaluating AI agent capabilities in a command line environment. This comprehensive evaluation framework measures how effectively AI agents can perform complex, real-world tasks within terminal environments. At Snorkel AI, we’re excited to share that we’re one of the top collaborators contributing
September 30, 2025
Tom Walshe
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Kobie Crawford
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Jeong Shin
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Parsing Isn’t Neutral: Why Evaluation Choices Matter
Behind every AI benchmark is a hidden choice: how to read the model’s answers. That choice—parsing—can quietly tilt results more than the model itself. Parsing is where we take an AI system’s raw response and extract the “answer” we use for scoring. It sounds mechanical, but as our research shows, the choice of parser can dramatically change measured accuracy. In
September 26, 2025
Justin Bauer
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The science of rubric design
Part 3 of our rubric series explains the science of rubric design. We show why rubrics should be treated like models—structured, measured, and iterated—to maximize objective alignment and inter-rater agreement. Learn how to choose hierarchy and scale points, track agreement (IAA) and LLMAJ alignment, and refine with domain experts, with examples like PaperBench and HealthBench.
September 11, 2025
Chris Glaze
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Charles Dickens
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The right tool for the job: An A-Z of rubrics
Rubrics turn fuzzy “good vs. bad” into measurable criteria for GenAI. In Part 2, we map what to measure (granularity and dataset-level vs instance-specific), where to measure (process vs outcome), and how to measure (humans, LLM-as-judge, code, reward models)—with examples like HHH, FLASK, HealthBench, and PaperBench.
September 2, 2025
Tom Walshe
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Armin Parchami
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Data quality and rubrics: how to build trust in your models
Rubrics aren’t just for evaluation—they’re a blueprint for better data annotation. In this post, we explore how structured rubrics enable scalable, high-quality labeling and evaluation of GenAI systems. Learn how Snorkel and leading labs use rubrics to align human and automated judgment and accelerate trusted AI development.
July 29, 2025
Armin Parchami