Hands On API - File download endpoint returns 404

[gotosatheesh41]

Describe the bug
The API does not returns files attached to task, every question with a file fails due to fail not available.

To Reproduce
curl -X 'GET'
'https://agents-course-unit4-scoring.hf.space/files/cca530fc-4052-43b2-b130-b30968d8aa44'
-H 'accept: application/json'

Screenshots
Response Payload
{
"detail": "No file path associated with task_id cca530fc-4052-43b2-b130-b30968d8aa44"
}

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[harsh21234i]

assign me!!

[meatballg1210]

Bug persists across all 5 file-attached tasks (5+ months after first community report)

TL;DR. This regression now reproduces against every file-attached task in the GAIA-20 manifest, not just cca530fc-…. It still fires today (2026-05-09), capping any submission at 15/20 = 75 %.

Affected task_ids

task_id	file_name from GET /questions	GET /files/{task_id} response
cca530fc-4052-43b2-b130-b30968d8aa44	cca530fc-…aa44.png	404 — {"detail":"No file path associated with task_id …"}
99c9cc74-fdc8-46c6-8f8d-3ce2d3bfeea3	99c9cc74-…eea3.mp3	same
f918266a-b3e0-4914-865d-4faa564f1aef	f918266a-…1aef.py	same
1f975693-876d-457b-a649-393859e79bf3	1f975693-…9bf3.mp3	same
7bd855d8-463d-4ed5-93ca-5fe35145f733	7bd855d8-…5733.xlsx	same

Reproduction (today, 2026-05-09)

One-line repro for all five

for id in cca530fc-4052-43b2-b130-b30968d8aa44 \
         99c9cc74-fdc8-46c6-8f8d-3ce2d3bfeea3 \
         f918266a-b3e0-4914-865d-4faa564f1aef \
         1f975693-876d-457b-a649-393859e79bf3 \
         7bd855d8-463d-4ed5-93ca-5fe35145f733; do
  printf "%s  " "$id"
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}  " "https://agents-course-unit4-scoring.hf.space/files/$id"
  curl -s "https://agents-course-unit4-scoring.hf.space/files/$id"; echo
done

Every task returns the same shape:

<task_id>  404  {"detail":"No file path associated with task_id <task_id>."}

Persistence timeline

• 2025-11-18 — first community report: https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/get-files-task-id-returning-404-for-every-task-id-with-file-name/170575
• 2025-12-06 — root cause + proposed fix posted by @john6666: https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/attachements-not-available-on-https-agents-course-unit4-scoring-hf-space-docs/171219
• 2026-02-06 — this issue filed
• 2026-05-06 — independently reproduced across all 5 task_ids during my agent's Phase 4 / 5 / 6 tool-verification runs
• 2026-05-09 — re-reproduced today against the live API; all 5 still 404

Impact

The 5 unanswerable tasks (1× image, 2× audio, 1× Python, 1× Excel) cap any submission at 15/20 = 75 %. For students whose agents would have handled most of the file-attached cohort, this is a 20–35 percentage-point swing versus a working endpoint. The course's ≥ 30 % certificate threshold is still reachable, but the public leaderboard is structurally distorted.

Root cause + proposed fix (citing forum #171219, not my work)

@john6666 diagnosed this as a relative-vs-absolute path mismatch: the GAIA dataset now ships files under repo-relative paths (e.g. 2023/test/<id>.png), but the Space's load_questions() still validates with os.path.exists() against an absolute path that never resolves, leaving task_file_paths empty. Their proposed fix is to resolve via the dataset:

hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="gaia-benchmark/GAIA",
    filename=local_file_path,
    repo_type="dataset",
    cache_dir=ALLOWED_CACHE_BASE,
)

Full context (and security considerations for cache-base validation) in https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/attachements-not-available-on-https-agents-course-unit4-scoring-hf-space-docs/171219.

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Reproduced from gaia-bot agent runs by @meatballg · https://huggingface.co/spaces/meatballG/gaia-bot · happy to provide further logs or run targeted probes.