BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life

Samuel Stevens, Jiaman Wu, Matthew J Thompson, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Chan Hee Song, David Edward Carlyn, Li Dong, Wasila M Dahdul, Charles Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19412-19424

Images of the natural world collected by a variety of cameras from drones to individual phones are increasingly abundant sources of biological information. There is an explosion of computational methods and tools particularly computer vision for extracting biologically relevant information from images for science and conservation. Yet most of these are bespoke approaches designed for a specific task and are not easily adaptable or extendable to new questions contexts and datasets. A vision model for general organismal biology questions on images is of timely need. To approach this we curate and release TreeOfLife-10M the largest and most diverse ML-ready dataset of biology images. We then develop BioCLIP a foundation model for the tree of life leveraging the unique properties of biology captured by TreeOfLife-10M namely the abundance and variety of images of plants animals and fungi together with the availability of rich structured biological knowledge. We rigorously benchmark our approach on diverse fine-grained biology classification tasks and find that BioCLIP consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines (by 17% to 20% absolute). Intrinsic evaluation reveals that BioCLIP has learned a hierarchical representation conforming to the tree of life shedding light on its strong generalizability. All data code and models will be publicly released upon acceptance.