Label-efficient underwater species classification with semi-supervised learning on frozen foundation model embeddings
This provides a practical, label-efficient solution for marine species recognition, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of high annotation costs and poor transferability in automated underwater species classification by using semi-supervised learning on frozen foundation model embeddings, achieving results close to fully supervised baselines with fewer than 5% of labels and narrowing the gap to a few percentage points at full supervision.
Automated species classification from underwater imagery is bottlenecked by the cost of expert annotation, and supervised models trained on one dataset rarely transfer to new conditions. We investigate whether semi-supervised methods operating on frozen foundation model embeddings can close this annotation gap with minimal labeling effort. Using DINOv3 ViT-B embeddings with no fine-tuning, we propagate a small set of labeled seeds through unlabeled data via nearest-neighbor-based self-training and evaluate on the AQUA20 benchmark (20 marine species). With fewer than 5% of the training labels, self-training on frozen embeddings closes much of the gap to a fully supervised ConvNeXt baseline trained on the entire labeled dataset; at full supervision, the gap narrows to a few percentage points, with several species exceeding the supervised baseline. Class separability in the embedding space, measured by ROC-AUC, is high even at extreme label scarcity, indicating that the frozen representations capture discriminative structure well before decision boundaries can be reliably estimated. Our approach requires no training, no domain-specific data engineering, and no underwater-adapted models, establishing a practical, immediately deployable baseline for label-efficient marine species recognition. All results are reported on the held-out test set over 100 random seed initializations.