1.8.0

This release turns soma into a first-class FM-benchmarking tool for spatial gene-expression prediction. It lands full HEST-Benchmark reproduction (9 tasks × 3 encoders) on soma's own native extraction stack, adds a new spatial_expression task type and a fast closed-form probe, and hardens the reproduce/ledger machinery so benchmark numbers are recorded, provenance-pinned, and judged against soma itself rather than gated against foreign stacks.

Added

• spatial_expression dataset_type — predict per-spot gene-expression matrices, with sidecar target-matrix plumbing throughout the pipeline (#263).
• HEST-Benchmark integration — an IDC curator (#264), a hest/IDC benchmark backed by a new closed-form Ridge+PCA probe (#266), scoped download + fan-out docs (#270), and a full 9-task × 3-encoder (uni2/virchow2/h-optimus-1) native reproduction that publishes the signed delta against HEST's numbers rather than gating on them (#275).
• Detection-benchmark harness — a multi-dataset encoder-ranking harness for detection tasks (#249).
• Committed results ledger — reproduced benchmark numbers are now recorded in an append-only, provenance-pinned ledger (soma_commit, slide2vec_version) so drift is caught against soma itself (#253).
• --curated-dir for soma reproduce — reuse a pre-curated manifest instead of re-curating each run (#274).
• PatchCamelyon materialization — the curator now builds PCam directly from EVA's official HDF5 (#254).

Changed

• The EVA reproduce gate is now a 2% relative band with a per-row tolerance_mode, instead of an absolute threshold (#272).
• Benchmark reference bands render as readable tables with linked sources, and HEST external Reference rows sit beside the Measured row for direct comparison (#271, #267).
• soma reproduce shares one feature cache across seeds, avoiding redundant extraction (#265).
• virchow2 is pinned to its CLS-only variant for hest/IDC (#268).
• Experiment identity is now test-invariant, with an overwrite-test guard (#250).
• The natural-image control encoder requires slide2vec>=5.3.0 (#243).
• Recorded eva/gleason_arvaniti reproductions (uni2) and scoped provenance to tracked code (#269, #273).

Fixed

• Multi-fold CV runs are now resumable — interrupted sweeps pick up where they left off (#252).
• Transient dense-grid reads retry with bounded backoff instead of failing the run (#251).
• eva/gleason_arvaniti is runnable end-to-end: tune_is_test fix plus a raw-download materializer (#255).