IBL BrainWideBench

What it is

IBL BrainWideBench is an evaluation suite for models trained on brain-wide spiking activity. The data comes from the IBL Brain Wide Map, Neuropixels recordings from 139 mice performing a sensory-guided decision-making task, with behavior measured at the same time.

Comparing such models has been difficult, because evaluation protocols are fragmented and most cover only a single task domain. The suite fixes the protocol so that different approaches can be measured on the same terms, including on recording sessions held out of the pretraining split.

A 34-second overview of the dataset, the task suites and the submission route.

How to use it

The documentation (opens in a new tab) covers each stage in full.

1
Set up
Clone the repository (opens in a new tab), create the environment, and download the recordings. The data is public and needs no credentials.
2
Pretrain, or start from a checkpoint
Train one shared model for all three suites, or download a released checkpoint (opens in a new tab) and go straight to evaluation.
3
Evaluate and save predictions
Run the suite you are targeting and save the predictions it produces.
4
Scale up and submit
Repeat across seeds and evaluation recordings, then upload the prediction files to the leaderboard (opens in a new tab). Scoring runs on the benchmark’s server, so you never handle the evaluation labels.

Citation

If you use IBL BrainWideBench, please cite the benchmark paper and the dataset it is built on. The benchmark entry is also in the repository’s CITATION.cff (opens in a new tab).

Benchmark paper

Andre, A., Mahato, S. P., Arora, V., et al. (2026) BrainWideBench: Benchmarking large-scale pretraining and across-animal transfer in multi-region neural recordings. arXiv:2609.22064.

@misc{iblbwb2026,
  title         = {BrainWideBench: Benchmarking large-scale pretraining and across-animal transfer in multi-region neural recordings},
  author        = {Alexandre Andre and Shivashriganesh P. Mahato and Vinam Arora and Keshav Balaji and Divyansha Lachi and Nanda H. Krishna and Jingyun Xiao and Yizi Zhang and Ximeng Mao and Wenrui Ma and Han Yu and International Brain Laboratory and Daniel Birman and Niccolo Bonacchi and Gaelle A. Chapuis and Joana A. Catarino and Felicia Davatolhagh and Mayo Faulkner and Laura Freitas-Silva and Fei Hu and Julia M. Huntenburg and Anup Khanal and Ines Laranjeira and Petrina Lau and Guido T. Meijer and Nathaniel J. Miska and Jean-Paul Noel and Alejandro Pan-Vazquez and Georg Raiser and Cyrille Rossant and Karolina Z. Socha and Anne E. Urai and Miles J. Wells and Steven J. West and Olivier Winter and Blake Richards and Guillaume Lajoie and Cole Hurwitz and Mehdi Azabou and Matthew R. Whiteway and Liam Paninski and Eva L. Dyer},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2609.22064},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.LG},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22064},
}

Dataset

International Brain Laboratory, Benson, B., Benson, J., et al. (2025) ‘A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour’, Nature, 645(8079), pp. 177-191.

@article{iblbwm2025,
  title   = {A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour},
  author  = {IBL and Benson, Brandon and Benson, Julius and Birman, Daniel and Bonacchi, Niccolo and Carandini, Matteo and Catarino, Joana A and Chapuis, Gaelle A and Churchland, Anne K and Dan, Yang and Dayan, Peter and DeWitt, Eric EJ and Engel, Tatiana A and Fabbri, Michele and Faulkner, Mayo and Fiete, Ila Rani and Findling, Charles and Freitas-Silva, Laura and Gercek, Berk and Harris, Kenneth D and Hausser, Michael and Hofer, Sonja B and Hu, Fei and Hubert, Felix and Huntenburg, Julia M and Khanal, Anup and Krasniak, Christopher and Langdon, Christopher and Lau, Petrina Y P and Mainen, Zachary F and Meijer, Guido T and Miska, Nathaniel J and Mrsic-Flogel, Thomas D and Noel, Jean-Paul and Nylund, Kai and Pan-Vazquez, Alejandro and Pouget, Alexandre and Rossant, Cyrille and Roth, Noam and Schaeffer, Rylan and Schartner, Michael and Shi, Yanliang and Socha, Karolina Z and Steinmetz, Nicholas A and Svoboda, Karel and Urai, Anne E and Wells, Miles J and West, Steven Jon and Whiteway, Matthew R and Winter, Olivier and Witten, Ilana B},
  journal = {Nature},
  volume  = {645},
  number  = {8079},
  pages   = {177--191},
  year    = {2025},
  url     = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09235-0},
}