HERBIOME is a modular, end‑to‑end pipeline that automates the digitization of herbarium labels. It combines YOLOv8 for component detection, CRAFT Hezar for word‑level text localization, a fine‑tuned TrOCR model for mixed handwritten and printed text recognition, and GPT‑4o Mini for structuring metadata into standardized fields. Evaluation on 450 French specimens shows high surface similarity (MWS ≈ 0.616) and moderate semantic accuracy (SMA ≈ 0.442), with taxonomic fields identified as the main challenge.
arXiv:2608. 14587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Recent advances in information retrieval (IR) leverage both dense and sparse representations, large language models (LLMs), and specialized retrieval models to improve ranking accuracy, relevance, and cross-lingual performance.
The study benchmarks Vision Transformers (ViTs) against convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for fine‑grained orchid genus identification in New Guinea’s species‑rich, data‑poor flora. Using a two‑stage system that first predicts genus and then retrieves similar species images, the authors fine‑tuned four pretrained backbones on 16,701 photographs from 120 genera and 1,350 species. The self‑supervised ViT DINOv2 achieved the highest genus accuracy (macro top‑1 66.9 %) and outperformed both CNNs and a domain‑matched pretrained ViT, demonstrating strong species retrieval and open‑set detection capabilities.
arXiv:2607. 03245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-throughput plant phenotyping generates valuable data that often remains trapped in unstructured text and isolated RGB images.
arXiv:2606. 29667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The materials science literature encodes decades of experimental knowledge in figures, yet this visual record remains locked away and inaccessible to AI at scale.
arXiv:2603. 14342v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern agricultural data is sourced from diverse platforms and spans multiple spatial scales, ranging from ground-level close-up photography to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial observation and satellite remote sensing imagery.
arXiv:2512. 15748v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual Species Recognition (VSR) is a fundamental task in scientific disciplines that require species-level identification, including ecology, palynology, evolutionary biology, systematics, and phylogenetics.
AT‑ViT is a dual‑branch Vision Transformer that processes both raw herbarium scans and their segmentation masks through a multi‑scale, multi‑view cross‑attention fusion. It uses a mask‑guided patch weighting scheme to emphasize plant regions and suppress background artifacts, thereby encouraging plant‑centric representations. In trait classification tasks such as leaf base shape and thorns, AT‑ViT consistently outperforms baselines, improves spatial attention grounding (IoU_p +15.66 to +18.03 pp, IoU_b –27.92 to –31.02 pp), and shows greater robustness to synthetic background perturbations, surpassing ResNet101 by up to +32.32 accuracy points and CrossViT by up to +5.07 points. whyItMatters":"The model addresses shortcut learning caused by background cues in herbarium images, leading to more accurate and interpretable plant trait recognition."
arXiv:2605.28868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metagenomic taxonomic annotation is essential for interpreting complex microbial communities, yet reliable annotation remains challenging und...
arXiv:2605. 28965v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linking free-text phenotype descriptions to ontology terms, typically referred to as phenotype annotation, is essential for the cross-study integration of comparative morphological data.
arXiv:2605. 05627v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sustainable forest management relies on precise species composition mapping, yet traditional ground surveys are labour-intensive and geographically constrained.
AgriScope is a unified pixel‑grounded multimodal framework designed for agricultural image understanding. It supports image‑level, region‑level, and pixel‑level tasks such as grounded caption generation, referring expression segmentation, and multi‑turn multimodal interaction. The authors also introduce AgriGround, a large‑scale dataset with over 500K images and 11M instruction‑following samples, created via an automatic annotation pipeline that combines caption generation, phrase‑level grounding, segmentation mask creation, and instruction synthesis.
MatMMExtract is an open‑source pipeline that disassembles compound scientific figures into individual sub‑panels and generates structured, grounded image‑text pairs using a large language model guided by a materials science taxonomy. Applied to 14,810 open‑access articles, it produced 391,606 panel‑level pairs with sub‑captions, a two‑level visualisation category (19 classes, 100+ subtypes), and scientific summaries. The project also introduces MaterialScope, a 2,811‑figure detection dataset, and demonstrates that Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite yields high‑quality annotations with low hallucination, while a dual‑encoder baseline outperforms zero‑shot CLIP on the resulting MatSciFig dataset.