# CBMR Multimodal

- **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:** [Dewei Hu](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/deweihu)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/deweihu96/admet-honest-audit
- **Demo video:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN4r4DUT9cg
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery/70

**What we investigated.** ML leaderboards present ranked models with narrow error
bars, which reads as evidence of predictive strength. But a February 2026 audit of
the Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC) ADMET benchmark (Receptor.AI, bioRxiv
2026.02.26.708193) found that most top-ranked entries fail on unavailable code,
non-reproducible environments, or data leakage, and that deliberately overfitting a
model to the open test set moves it up the rankings. On a benchmark with a fully
open test set, climbing and cheating can be the same act. We asked: can an AI agent
iteratively improve ADMET models *honestly*, and what does honest iteration reveal
about the benchmark itself?

**What we built.** An agentic pipeline, driven by Claude Code as a research agent,
that does two things in one loop. It **climbs**: an agent proposes model designs,
trains them, and selects among them to improve validation performance. And it
**audits**: the same loop checks every model and data split for leakage and reports
its own results with honest uncertainty. Honesty is enforced structurally, not by
good intentions. Four roles are separated so the component that touches the test set
cannot influence the one that designs models: a proposer (designs models on
validation only), an executor (trains and scores on validation), a deterministic
arbiter (promotes only on non-overlapping confidence intervals; keeps simpler models
on ties), and a walled auditor (the only component allowed to touch test-set
molecules, for leakage checks, and it returns only a summary verdict with no labels).
The test set is reachable only by the auditor and by a single final-evaluation step,
run once after a model is locked. The iteration loop has no code path to the test set.
The human is inside the loop but subject to the same accounting as the agent: repeated
testing widens the reported uncertainty, and the tool refuses high-complexity model
tiers on endpoints too small to support them.

**What we found**, across 10 of the 22 ADMET endpoints:
- Honest iteration climbs where there is signal and plateaus where there is not. In
  3 of 10 endpoints models measurably separated, all the same physically motivated
  move (physicochemical descriptors beating substructural fingerprints on
  descriptor-driven properties). In the other 7 the models were statistically
  indistinguishable, and the loop reported that instead of manufacturing a winner.
- On small endpoints, the leaderboard ranks noise. The test-set bootstrap interval
  on small imbalanced endpoints is wide enough to span most of the leaderboard, so
  the fine-grained rankings there are not supported by the sampling error.
- A documented leakage bug drifted silently across data versions (patched on two
  endpoints, still live on a third), and a two-axis leakage check proved necessary:
  on one endpoint, real duplicates that structural similarity missed were caught only
  by a desalted-identity check, while on another, a structural false positive was
  correctly cleared by the identity axis.

**Why it matters.** Our contribution is not a better ADMET model. It is a
demonstration that an AI agent can do the iterative modeling work without the
test-set overfitting that compromises the benchmark, and can audit the benchmark's
integrity as it goes, producing results honest about what the data can and cannot
support. The same pipeline, run as new models are submitted, is a standing integrity
check on a leaderboard rather than another entry gaming it. The full pipeline, the
10-endpoint findings, and the cached data reproduce from a fresh clone on a standard
laptop.

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