AI and the World's Hard Problems · Life sciences · arXiv · 2026-10-20
Bombadil: A Foundation Model for Plant Electrophysiology
Machine-learning models that predict plant stress from electrical signals have been built for single tasks and do not transfer across species or environments. The authors present Bombadil, a foundation model pretrained without labels on over 4 million hours of signals from 100 plant species in ten environments. It tracks seven physiological stress indicators, including for species and stressors that had no labels in training.