Repère

Repère is an open evaluation framework for scientific AI agents in the geosciences. It measures whether a model or multi-agent system meets a task-specific quality floor, and what it costs to get there — so labs can adopt AI on measured evidence, not demos and anecdotes. Rigor is preserved by scoring against reference truth wherever possible; frugality is first-class because the interesting winner is the cheapest system that still clears the floor.

The narrative overview lives on the landing page (served from site/); this README is the developer guide.

v0.5.2 — the held-out splits leave the repository and the wheel (September 2026). pip install repere. Import paths are repere / repere_suites, the CLI is repere, the sandbox image is ghcr.io/mdenolle/repere-sandbox:v0.5.0, and the 31 FM_* environment variables are now REPERE_* with no back-compatibility shim. The substrate is unchanged from v0.4.0: InspectAI @task / @solver / @scorer, a pinned Docker sandbox, a multi-step ReAct baseline with three Inspect tools, and telemetry aligned with EvalSample / EvalOutput. See CHANGELOG.md for the full set and ROADMAP.md for what's next.

The current repository contains:

• A minimal core evaluation framework in src/repere.
• Benchmark suites across three task families (see below) in src/repere_suites/.
• Public sample fixtures for local development, plus a private-golden-data policy for hidden evaluation sets (how to hold hidden gold: docs/golden_data_provisioning.md).
• A static landing page + leaderboard in site/ for GitHub Pages.
• Manual CI scaffolding for smoke tests and future scheduled evals.

Repère-RCA (design branch)

A suite for agents serving the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array is being designed on design/rca-harness: three agent families (coding, literature review, sensor), seven task groups, four verification tiers, a golden-record schema with a validator, a frozen price map, a cost-and-repeats runner, and 16 template records. Start at DESIGN.md and OPEN_QUESTIONS.md; the documentation index is docs/rca/README.md. Every record is a template until a named co-author verifies it.

Task families

Geoscience work is diverse, so the suite spans three families, each scored by the most verifiable method the task allows:

Grading runs on a scorability spectrum — every task is pushed as far toward a deterministic reference (T0) as it will go, falling back to an LLM-judge rubric (T4) only when nothing else fits. To contribute a dataset, see docs/dataset_submission.md.

The demo leaderboard is deliberately populated with laptop-scale open models (7–8B via Ollama: qwen2.5, llama3.1, deepseek-r1, olmo2) plus one cloud model as a reference ceiling. Small models make the frugality claim falsifiable (they don't automatically clear the quality floor), keep the board reproducible without a credit card, and are the models allowed to touch embargoed data. See docs/laptop_scale_mvp.md — which also states plainly what the demo board is and is not.

Why this exists

Multi-agent systems often use expensive frontier models for every step, even when a smaller model is good enough for extraction, plotting, code generation, or reporting. Repère aims to learn and enforce task-specific quality floors from hidden/private golden datasets, then route subagent work by cost subject to rigor constraints.

Initial focus:

1. Define reproducible benchmark suites with deterministic scorers where possible.
2. Maintain public sample fixtures for development.
3. Keep full golden datasets private to reduce overfitting.
4. Run evals on demand first.
5. Promote to scheduled weekly GitHub Actions evals when provider credentials, budgets, and private data access are ready.

Repository layout

repere/
├── src/
│   ├── repere/                  # Core eval primitives and CLI
│   │   ├── adapters.py              # AnthropicAdapter, OpenAICompatAdapter, EchoAdapter
│   │   ├── budget.py                # BudgetGuard
│   │   ├── leaderboard.py           # LeaderboardRunner + skill-lift export
│   │   ├── registry.py              # YAML model-registry loader
│   │   ├── router.py                # FrugalRouter
│   │   ├── skills.py                # SkillLoader, SkillManifest, render modes
│   │   └── telemetry.py             # JSONLTelemetry
│   └── repere_suites/           # Benchmark suites across 3 task families
│       ├── sta_lta/                 # Family 2 — STA/LTA seismic pipeline (reference suite)
│       ├── pipeline_regression/     # Family 2 — prompt→data numerical regression
│       ├── dvv/                     # Family 2 — dv/v processing (codameter-backed)
│       ├── gaia_data_downloader/    # Family 2 — data-download coding agent
│       ├── lit_rag/                 # Family 1 — retrieval / translation / grounded QA
│       └── orchestration/           # Family 3 — non-linear subagent workflows
├── config/
│   └── models.yaml                  # 13-model registry (nano/small/medium/big/cloud)
├── notebooks/                       # Interactive walkthroughs (quickstart, etc.)
├── scripts/                         # Small standalone runners
├── tests/                           # Deterministic test suite (~260 tests)
├── docs/                            # Archived suite docs and design notes
├── site/                            # GitHub Pages leaderboard
├── .github/skills/                  # Domain-agent skills + manifest.yaml
├── .github/workflows/               # Manual CI scaffold
├── pyproject.toml                   # Python package metadata
├── pixi.toml                        # Primary development environment
└── environment.yml                  # Conda fallback

The original STA/LTA suite README has been preserved in docs/sta_lta_suite_v0.md.

Quickstart with Pixi

Install Pixi, then run:

pixi install
pixi run test                # deterministic test suite (~260 tests, no providers)
pixi run smoke-eval          # stub eval; writes results/stub_eval.json
pixi run export-leaderboard  # builds site/data/leaderboard.json

pixi run test does not need ObsPy, network access, model-provider credentials, or private goldens.

Install from PyPI

pip install repere                     # core framework + CLI
pip install "repere[eval,rca,plot]"    # InspectAI substrate, RCA validator, plot scorer
pip install "repere[geo]"              # ObsPy, for the waveform-fetching suites

The dv/v suite's scoring backend is pinned to an immutable git commit, which PyPI will not accept as a declared dependency, so it installs separately:

pip install -r requirements-dvv.txt

The CLI also exposes:

pixi run repere list-models             # print the loaded model registry
pixi run repere list-skills             # print skills + their suite bindings
pixi run repere run-skill-lift          # offline skill-lift demo
pixi run repere run-ollama-intent --model mistral:7b --skill stalta-detection

Running local evals and viewing the dashboard

If you have an Ollama server running with at least one model pulled (e.g. ollama pull mistral), you can populate the leaderboard end-to-end from your own machine:

# 1. Verify the model is available.
curl -s http://localhost:11434/api/tags | python -m json.tool

# 2. Run the STA/LTA intent-extraction suite under two conditions
#    (generic vs skill-conditioned). Each writes one JSON result file
#    under results/.
pixi run -e full repere run-ollama-intent \
    --model mistral:latest --condition generic
pixi run -e full repere run-ollama-intent \
    --model mistral:latest --skill stalta-detection --skill-mode instructions

# 3. Optional baselines: a deterministic stub eval and the offline
#    skill-lift benchmark, also written to results/.
pixi run -e full repere smoke-eval
pixi run -e full repere run-skill-lift \
    --skill stalta-detection --output results/skill_lift_stalta.json

# 4. Aggregate every JSON file under results/ into the static dashboard
#    payload that the GitHub Pages app consumes.
pixi run -e full repere export-leaderboard \
    --results-dir results --output site/data/leaderboard.json

# 5. Serve the dashboard locally and open it in a browser.
python -m http.server 8765 --directory site
# then visit http://localhost:8765/#leaderboard

Add more rows by pulling additional Ollama models (ollama pull llama3.1:8b, ollama pull qwen2.5:7b) and repeating step 2 with --model <id>. Each unique (model, condition) pair becomes its own row.

Conda fallback

If Pixi is unavailable:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate repere
python -m pip install -e .
python -m pytest
python -m repere.cli smoke-eval
python -m repere.cli export-leaderboard

Notebooks

The fastest way to see the framework in action is the quickstart notebook:

pip install -e ".[dev]" jupyter
jupyter lab notebooks/

Then open notebooks/01_skill_lift_quickstart.ipynb. It walks through three small-tier models (mistral:7b, llama3.1:8b, qwen2.5:7b) running the public STA/LTA intent-extraction suite under none vs full skill conditions and produces a leaderboard JSON. The default path uses an EchoAdapter so it runs offline; the last section shows how to swap to a live Ollama server with a one-line factory change.

To run the same demo from the command line without the notebook:

python scripts/demo_small_models.py            # offline stub demo
python scripts/demo_small_models.py --live     # uses local Ollama

See notebooks/README.md for more.

Current benchmark suite

The STA/LTA suite tests a seismic analysis pipeline:

1. Intent extraction from natural language to FDSN query JSON.
2. ObsPy waveform-fetch code generation.
3. STA/LTA trigger code generation.
4. Plot generation and comparison to approved goldens.
5. One-paragraph technical reporting.

The truth set has six events across regional earthquakes, teleseisms, noise days and quarry blasts. Two are the public validation split, committed in events.yaml. The other four are the test split and are not in this repository and not in the wheel: their rows carry expected_detection, the reference stalta_params and the station picks, so committing them would publish the gold. They live in $REPERE_EVAL_DATA_DIR/sta_lta_test.yaml and are merged at load time; _load_events(split="test") raises a FileNotFoundError naming that path when the partition is absent, rather than quietly returning nothing. Several held-out entries are marked VERIFY; do not publish benchmark numbers until those catalog entries are validated.

The rationale for starting with STA/LTA is documented in docs/stalta_benchmark_rationale.md. In short, this is the smallest complete earthquake-seismology coding pipeline: fetch waveform data, detect a possible event, plot the result, and explain whether the source is plausibly local/regional, teleseismic, anthropogenic, or noise.

A draft seismology domain skill is available at .github/skills/seismo-data-agent/SKILL.md. Runs that use it should be labeled separately from raw coding-agent runs, for example with agent_condition = "SeismoDataAgent+skill-v0.1-draft". Leaderboard condition metadata are described in docs/leaderboard_conditions.md.

Golden datasets

The STA/LTA suite uses two kinds of gold, and the leaderboard is a third artifact derived from runs over those golds. All three are reproducible from the scripts in scripts/, and each has a drift test that fails when the artifact and its source diverge.

1. Build the (prompt, gold) fixtures for the four parametric suites

Four of the five STA/LTA suites are parametric over events.yaml — intent_extraction, fetch_code, trigger_code, and report all derive every prompt and every gold answer at runtime from the same truth set. To get a human-inspectable static view of what the benchmark asks each model:

python scripts/build_suite_fixtures.py

This writes one JSON file per suite under tests/fixtures/:

tests/fixtures/
├── sta_lta.intent_extraction.json   # 6 items, JSON-shaped golds
├── sta_lta.fetch_code.json          # 6 items, code-execution scoring
├── sta_lta.trigger_code.json        # 6 items, code-execution scoring
└── sta_lta.report.json              # 6 items, lexical scoring

Each item looks like this (snippet from sta_lta.intent_extraction.json):

{
  "item_index": 0,
  "prompt": "Extract a JSON object describing the FDSN waveform request for this analysis task:\n\nTask: M6.8 Nisqually deep intraslab earthquake\nOrigin time (UTC): 2001-02-28T18:54:32.8\nSuggested station: UW.LON..BHZ\nSuggested window: ±7.5 minutes around origin.\n\nReturn ONLY a JSON object with keys: network, station, location, channel, starttime, endtime. Use ISO-8601 timestamps.",
  "gold": {
    "network": "UW",
    "station": "LON",
    "location": "",
    "channel": "BHZ",
    "starttime": "2001-02-28T18:47:02.800000+00:00",
    "endtime": "2001-02-28T19:02:02.800000+00:00"
  }
}

The fixtures are not the gold; events.yaml is. The fixtures are a static rendering of what the live suites currently emit, so reviewers can read prompts and golds in a PR without running Python. If you change events.yaml or a suite prompt template, regenerate the fixtures and commit the diff in the same PR. tests/test_suite_fixtures.py will fail until you do.

Only the four *.validation.json fixtures are committed. A test-split fixture spells the reference stalta_params out in its prompt text and carries the gold, so build_suite_fixtures.py --splits test writes into $REPERE_EVAL_DATA_DIR/fixtures/ instead, and tests/test_no_holdout_in_repo.py fails if one is ever committed.

2. Build the plot PNG goldens

The fifth suite (plot) compares model output to a reference PNG via SSIM. The generator is scripts/build_plot_goldens.py; it supports two output modes (public vs private) and two data modes (real FDSN vs deterministic synthetic):

# (A) Public goldens, real FDSN data — commits under data/golden/.
#     Use only for citable events that have been validated against a catalog.
python scripts/build_plot_goldens.py --only nisqually-2001 tohoku-2011-teleseism

# (B) Private goldens for VERIFY events still under validation.
#     Output dir is gitignored; REPERE_STALTA_GOLDEN_DIR points scorers at it.
REPERE_STALTA_GOLDEN_DIR=~/private/fm_goldens \
  python scripts/build_plot_goldens.py --private \
  --only pnsn-quiet-day-VERIFY mt-rainier-swarm-2024-VERIFY

# (C) Synthetic-data fallback for sandboxes / CI smoke. Deterministic.
#     Do NOT publish benchmark numbers against synthetic goldens.
python scripts/build_plot_goldens.py --synth --only nisqually-2001 tohoku-2011-teleseism

The recipe — preprocessing, STA/LTA, and the matplotlib layout — is pinned in src/repere_suites/sta_lta/recipe.py and shared by both data modes. The two-panel layout (waveform + STA/LTA, red dashed vertical lines at trigger onsets, station/event title) matches what the seismic-plotting skill instructs models to produce.

The two public goldens currently committed (nisqually-2001.png, tohoku-2011-teleseism.png) were generated in synthetic mode. Regenerate with mode (A) on a host with EarthScope/IRIS access before any leaderboard publication.

3. Build the static-site leaderboard data

After running real evals (or just the offline demo), refresh the JSON files the GitHub-Pages site reads:

# Run the offline 3-small-models demo to produce results/demo_small_models.json:
python scripts/demo_small_models.py

# Or hit local Ollama instead:
python scripts/demo_small_models.py --live

# Then build the static-site data:
python scripts/build_site_data.py

This writes:

• site/data/leaderboard.json — main per-row leaderboard (rank, model, agent_condition, suite, score, cost, completed, efficiency).
• site/data/skill_lift.json — per-model lift table (score_none, score_full, lift, cost_lift_pct).

The HTML page at site/index.html renders both as two separate tables. To preview locally:

cd site && python -m http.server 8123
# then open http://127.0.0.1:8123/

tests/test_site_data.py validates the schema of both JSON files and checks that every querySelector('#…') in site/app.js has a matching id in the HTML — a regression in either side of the contract fails the test before it reaches Pages.

Public-vs-private policy

• Commit small public fixtures, sample events, and PNG goldens for VERIFIED citable events (Nisqually 2001, Tōhoku 2011).
• Do not commit full private goldens, provider secrets, or paid-eval outputs.
• Point scorers at private STA/LTA goldens via REPERE_STALTA_GOLDEN_DIR; the generator's --private flag respects it.
• Store local eval outputs under results/, which is gitignored.
• Use GitHub Actions secrets for future private CI access.
• Promote generated artifacts to public goldens only after human review of the catalog match and the underlying waveform.

Tests that protect each artifact

Manual evals now, weekly later

The initial workflow is manual by design. The GitHub Actions scaffold supports workflow_dispatch and runs smoke tests by default. A weekly schedule is included as a commented scaffold for later activation once costs, secrets, and private data access are configured.

Live leaderboard

The static leaderboard lives in site/ and is deployed by .github/workflows/pages.yml using GitHub Pages. On each push to main, the workflow runs tests, generates a public smoke leaderboard, and deploys the static site artifact.

To update the leaderboard locally:

pixi run smoke-eval
pixi run export-leaderboard

For GitHub, set Pages to deploy from GitHub Actions if it is not already enabled in repository settings. Private golden-set results should only be exported into the public site after human approval.

Leaderboard rows include an agent_condition field so a raw generic-coding-agent run is not mixed with a SeismoDataAgent+skill-v0.1-draft run. Skill-assisted runs may also include skill_name and skill_version.

Roadmap

The current plan is in ROADMAP.md — three phases of work aligning Repère with AstaBench and InspectAI standards while keeping Repère's distinct identity (skills system, frugality-first framing, parametric truth set, negative-case discipline). Each item is a candidate GitHub issue under the astabench-alignment label; bootstrap them with:

bash scripts/create_roadmap_issues.sh           # all items
bash scripts/create_roadmap_issues.sh --dry-run # preview only
bash scripts/create_roadmap_issues.sh --only P1.1 P1.3

The script is idempotent: re-running it updates existing issues by [Px.y] title prefix rather than creating duplicates. New issues should follow the roadmap-item template at .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/roadmap_item.yml.