Shivani Chiranjeevi

Shivani Chiranjeevi, Mojdeh Sadaati, Zi K Deng et al.

Insect-pests significantly impact global agricultural productivity and quality. Effective management involves identifying the full insect community, including beneficial insects and harmful pests, to develop and implement integrated pest management strategies. Automated identification of insects under real-world conditions presents several challenges, including differentiating similar-looking species, intra-species dissimilarity and inter-species similarity, several life cycle stages, camouflage, diverse imaging conditions, and variability in insect orientation. A deep-learning model, InsectNet, is proposed to address these challenges. InsectNet is endowed with five key features: (a) utilization of a large dataset of insect images collected through citizen science; (b) label-free self-supervised learning for large models; (c) improving prediction accuracy for species with a small sample size; (d) enhancing model trustworthiness; and (e) democratizing access through streamlined MLOps. This approach allows accurate identification (>96% accuracy) of over 2500 insect species, including pollinator (e.g., butterflies, bees), parasitoid (e.g., some wasps and flies), predator species (e.g., lady beetles, mantises, dragonflies) and harmful pest species (e.g., armyworms, cutworms, grasshoppers, stink bugs). InsectNet can identify invasive species, provide fine-grained insect species identification, and work effectively in challenging backgrounds. It also can abstain from making predictions when uncertain, facilitating seamless human intervention and making it a practical and trustworthy tool. InsectNet can guide citizen science data collection, especially for invasive species where early detection is crucial. Similar approaches may transform other agricultural challenges like disease detection and underscore the importance of data collection, particularly through citizen science efforts..

Muhammad Arbab Arshad, Tirtho Roy, Yanben Shen et al.

Plant disease diagnosis is critical for food security, yet training disease-recognition models that generalize across crops, pathogens, and field conditions remains challenging because labeled disease images are far less abundant and standardized than data for other biotic stresses such as insects or weeds. Frontier vision-language models offer new opportunities through improved visual reasoning, but they still struggle with fine-grained disease identification due to the lack of structured, crop-specific symptom knowledge. To address this gap, we curate the largest plant disease image--symptom dataset to date, covering 335 crops, 1{,}251 disease classes, and approximately 839K images, designed to support training-free, agentic disease prediction. A scalable automated pipeline generates source-grounded symptom descriptions in which each claim is linked to a verbatim web quote; domain experts validate sampled crops and reconcile disease-name variants across sources. As a baseline, we introduce an autonomous visual reasoning agent that identifies anatomical context, narrows candidate diseases using symptom knowledge, sequentially compares reference images, and produces a fully explainable reasoning trace. Incorporating symptom knowledge improves accuracy by 16.2 percentage points on average at the full reference budget, with consistent gains across all four evaluation crops. Because the framework only requires crop-specific reference images and symptom knowledge, it can be extended to new crops without retraining, while the agentic baseline can directly benefit from future improvements in foundation model capabilities. Dataset and code are available at:https://sage-dataset.github.io/.

Shivani Chiranjeevi, Hossein Zaremehrjerdi, Zi K. Deng et al.

The rapid global loss of biodiversity, particularly among insects, represents an urgent ecological crisis. Current methods for insect species discovery are manual, slow, and severely constrained by taxonomic expertise, hindering timely conservation actions. We introduce TerraIncognita, a dynamic benchmark designed to evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal models for the challenging problem of identifying unknown, potentially undescribed insect species from image data. Our benchmark dataset combines a mix of expertly annotated images of insect species likely known to frontier AI models, and images of rare and poorly known species, for which few/no publicly available images exist. These images were collected from underexplored biodiversity hotspots, realistically mimicking open-world discovery scenarios faced by ecologists. The benchmark assesses models' proficiency in hierarchical taxonomic classification, their capability to detect and abstain from out-of-distribution (OOD) samples representing novel species, and their ability to generate explanations aligned with expert taxonomic knowledge. Notably, top-performing models achieve over 90\% F1 at the Order level on known species, but drop below 2\% at the Species level, highlighting the sharp difficulty gradient from coarse to fine taxonomic prediction (Order $\rightarrow$ Family $\rightarrow$ Genus $\rightarrow$ Species). TerraIncognita will be updated regularly, and by committing to quarterly dataset expansions (of both known and novel species), will provide an evolving platform for longitudinal benchmarking of frontier AI methods. All TerraIncognita data, results, and future updates are available \href{https://baskargroup.github.io/TerraIncognita/}{here}.

Chih-Hsuan Yang, Benjamin Feuer, Zaki Jubery et al.

We introduce BioTrove, the largest publicly accessible dataset designed to advance AI applications in biodiversity. Curated from the iNaturalist platform and vetted to include only research-grade data, BioTrove contains 161.9 million images, offering unprecedented scale and diversity from three primary kingdoms: Animalia ("animals"), Fungi ("fungi"), and Plantae ("plants"), spanning approximately 366.6K species. Each image is annotated with scientific names, taxonomic hierarchies, and common names, providing rich metadata to support accurate AI model development across diverse species and ecosystems. We demonstrate the value of BioTrove by releasing a suite of CLIP models trained using a subset of 40 million captioned images, known as BioTrove-Train. This subset focuses on seven categories within the dataset that are underrepresented in standard image recognition models, selected for their critical role in biodiversity and agriculture: Aves ("birds"), Arachnida ("spiders/ticks/mites"), Insecta ("insects"), Plantae ("plants"), Fungi ("fungi"), Mollusca ("snails"), and Reptilia ("snakes/lizards"). To support rigorous assessment, we introduce several new benchmarks and report model accuracy for zero-shot learning across life stages, rare species, confounding species, and multiple taxonomic levels. We anticipate that BioTrove will spur the development of AI models capable of supporting digital tools for pest control, crop monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and environmental conservation. These advancements are crucial for ensuring food security, preserving ecosystems, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. BioTrove is publicly available, easily accessible, and ready for immediate use.

Mojdeh Saadati, Aditya Balu, Shivani Chiranjeevi et al.

Deep learning-based approaches have produced models with good insect classification accuracy; Most of these models are conducive for application in controlled environmental conditions. One of the primary emphasis of researchers is to implement identification and classification models in the real agriculture fields, which is challenging because input images that are wildly out of the distribution (e.g., images like vehicles, animals, humans, or a blurred image of an insect or insect class that is not yet trained on) can produce an incorrect insect classification. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection algorithms provide an exciting avenue to overcome these challenge as it ensures that a model abstains from making incorrect classification prediction of non-insect and/or untrained insect class images. We generate and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art OOD algorithms on insect detection classifiers. These algorithms represent a diversity of methods for addressing an OOD problem. Specifically, we focus on extrusive algorithms, i.e., algorithms that wrap around a well-trained classifier without the need for additional co-training. We compared three OOD detection algorithms: (i) Maximum Softmax Probability, which uses the softmax value as a confidence score, (ii) Mahalanobis distance-based algorithm, which uses a generative classification approach; and (iii) Energy-Based algorithm that maps the input data to a scalar value, called energy. We performed an extensive series of evaluations of these OOD algorithms across three performance axes: (a) \textit{Base model accuracy}: How does the accuracy of the classifier impact OOD performance? (b) How does the \textit{level of dissimilarity to the domain} impact OOD performance? and (c) \textit{Data imbalance}: How sensitive is OOD performance to the imbalance in per-class sample size?