H. Muralidharan
Publications
EpiBench: Verifiable Evaluation of AI Agents on Epigenomics Analysis
We introduce EpiBench, a verifiable benchmark for short-horizon epigenomics analysis. EpiBench evaluates whether agents can make well-defined analysis decisions from realistic workflow states and return deterministically gradable answers. The benchmark includes 106 evaluations across CUT\&Tag/CUT\&RUN, ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and DNA methylation workflows. Across 5,088 valid trajectories from 16 model-harness pairs, no system passed a majority of attempts: GPT-5.5 / Pi led at 45.0\% (143/318 attempts; 95\% confidence interval (CI), 36.3--53.7), followed by GPT-5.5 / OpenAI Codex at 39.9\% (127/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 31.6--48.3). Claude Opus 4.8 Max / Pi and GPT-5.4 / Pi each passed 39.0\% (124/318 attempts; 95\% CI, 30.2--47.8 and 31.0--47.0, respectively). Performance varies across assay types, and many failed runs still contain parts of the correct answer. Agents often found the right files and computed useful intermediate results, but failed when the task required deeper, assay-specific scientific judgment.
Verifiable Benchmarking of Long-Horizon Spatial Biology
AI agents are increasingly useful for biological data analysis, but existing benchmarks mostly test broad biological knowledge, executable workflows, or localized analysis steps rather than end-to-end scientific reasoning over spatial measurements. We introduce SpatialBench-Long, a benchmark for long-horizon spatial biology in which agents must recover biological claims from raw or near-raw data and calibrated experimental context without prescribed methods. SpatialBench-Long contains 24 evaluations across primary pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), engineered glioblastoma organoids and in vivo tumors, Cas9 lineage-traced lung adenocarcinoma, and mouse optic nerve aging/intervention systems, spanning CosMx, Visium, Xenium, multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH), single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), Slide-seq, Slide-tags, histology, and lineage-recording data. Candidate claims are hardened through reproduction, independent scientist review, and trajectory inspection. Final answers are graded deterministically over controlled vocabularies and symbols with companion rubrics capturing progress through key analysis chokepoints. Across the SpatialBench-Long benchmark, three model-harness pairs tie at 8/72 runs (11.1\%): Gemini 3.5 Flash / Pi terminal coding harness, GPT-5.5 / Pi, and GPT-5.5 / OpenAI Codex. SpatialBench-Long tests whether agents can move beyond executing procedural analysis to deriving accurate scientific conclusions from complex spatial measurements.
scBench: Evaluating AI Agents on Single-Cell RNA-seq Analysis
As single-cell RNA sequencing datasets grow in adoption, scale, and complexity, data analysis remains a bottleneck for many research groups. Although frontier AI agents have improved dramatically at software engineering and general data analysis, it remains unclear whether they can extract biological insight from messy, real-world single-cell datasets. We introduce scBench, a benchmark of 394 verifiable problems derived from practical scRNA-seq workflows spanning six sequencing platforms and seven task categories. Each problem provides a snapshot of experimental data immediately prior to an analysis step and a deterministic grader that evaluates recovery of a key biological result. Benchmark data on eight frontier models shows that accuracy ranges from 29-53%, with strong model-task and model-platform interactions. Platform choice affects accuracy as much as model choice, with 40+ percentage point drops on less-documented technologies. scBench complements SpatialBench to cover the two dominant single-cell modalities, serving both as a measurement tool and a diagnostic lens for developing agents that can analyze real scRNA-seq datasets faithfully and reproducibly.