10 papers
Beyond Flat Labels: Level-Restricted Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Fine-Grained Vision Classification
Zhiyuan Tao, Srikumar Sastry, Matthew J Thompson +9
Multimodal contrastive learning has enabled zero-shot visual classification by aligning images with textual categories. However, in hierarchically structured label spaces, existing…
Frontier LLM-based agents can overcome the ontology curation bottleneck for natural phenotypes
James P. Balhoff, Hilmar Lapp
Linking free-text phenotype descriptions to ontology terms, typically referred to as phenotype annotation, is essential for the cross-study integration of comparative morphological…
BioCAP: Exploiting Synthetic Captions Beyond Labels in Biological Foundation Models
Ziheng Zhang, Xinyue Ma, Arpita Chowdhury +9
This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary s…
A continental-scale dataset of ground beetles with high-resolution images and validated morphological trait measurements
S M Rayeed, Mridul Khurana, Alyson East +18
Despite the ecological significance of invertebrates, global trait databases remain heavily biased toward vertebrates and plants, limiting comprehensive ecological analyses of high…
BioCLIP 2: Emergent Properties from Scaling Hierarchical Contrastive Learning
Jianyang Gu, Samuel Stevens, Elizabeth G Campolongo +13
Foundation models trained at scale exhibit remarkable emergent behaviors, learning new capabilities beyond their initial training objectives. We find such emergent behaviors in bio…
Optimizing Image Capture for Computer Vision-Powered Taxonomic Identification and Trait Recognition of Biodiversity Specimens
Alyson East, Elizabeth G. Campolongo, Luke Meyers +25
1) Biological collections house millions of specimens with digital images increasingly available through open-access platforms. However, most imaging protocols were developed for h…