BrainWideBench Tests Whether Neural Pretraining Transfers Across 139 Mice and 276 Brain Regions

arXiv 2609.22064·low signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

BrainWideBench is built on the International Brain Laboratory Brainwide Map, spanning 276 brain regions from 139 mice performing a sensory-guided decision-making task, and organizes evaluation into three suites: downstream behavioral decoding, prediction of masked or future neural activity, and recovery of biologically meaningful anatomical organization. It covers both finetuning and zero-shot generalization to unseen animals, addressing the fragmented evaluation protocols that have made across-animal transfer claims hard to compare. Pretraining beats matched single-session baselines, but transfer is heterogeneous and gains depend strongly on alignment between the pretraining objective and the downstream task.