# Plant Benchy

- **Event:** [Built with Claude: Life Sciences](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences)
- **When:** Jul 7 at 12:00 PM – Jul 14 at 12:00 AM (EDT)
- **Where:** Online
- **Team:** [Sarhaan Gulati](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/sarhaan)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/sarhaan77/plant-bench
- **Demo video:** https://www.loom.com/share/6856411ada7b4007ba4a7386c623aa06
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery/250

I built plant-bench, an open, reproducible benchmark for plant genomics foundation models.

The problem it solves: there are now several strong DNA sequence models for plants (Evo2, PlantCAD2, AgroNT), but no consistent way to compare them. Every paper uses its own fine-tuning scripts, unpinned datasets, and unshared weights, so a promoter-strength R² from one paper can't really be trusted against another. plant-bench fixes that by making every benchmark number a verifiable artifact, pinned to the exact model revision, dataset hash, and code commit that produced it, and rerunnable to the same value.

I built it around a simple idea: a benchmark is just models × datasets × tasks, evaluated into content-addressed results. Adding a model, dataset, or task is literally dropping one file into the repo, with no central registration. All the heavy inference and fine-tuning runs on Modal, and every result is stored with full provenance.

The other thing I cared about is making it agent-first. It's designed to be driven by Claude Code, with skills that handle the common loops, so two kinds of people can contribute in a single prompt: plant biologists who have a labeled dataset and want a benchmark that other people's models get scored on, and ML folks who have a model and want to see how it stacks up on real plant-biology tasks.

I've got five models wired, four datasets, and four tasks (promoter strength, gene expression, lncRNA classification, and a zero-shot regulatory test), plus a live leaderboard UI, and the first real numbers are landing now

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