VLM4Bio: A Benchmark Dataset to Evaluate Pretrained Vision-Language
  Models for Trait Discovery from Biological Images
Authors: name: M. Maruf, name: Arka Daw, name: Kazi Sajeed Mehrab, name: Harish Babu Manogaran, name: Abhilash Neog, name: Medha Sawhney, name: Mridul Khurana, name: James P. Balhoff, name: Yasin Bakis, name: Bahadir Altintas, name: Matthew J. Thompson, name: Elizabeth G. Campolongo, name: Josef C. Uyeda, name: Hilmar Lapp, name: Henry L. Bart, name: Paula M. Mabee, name: Yu Su, name: Wei-Lun Chao, name: Charles Stewart, name: Tanya Berger-Wolf, name: Wasila Dahdul, name: Anuj Karpatne
Organization: HDR Imageomics Institute

Images are increasingly becoming the currency for documenting biodiversity on
the planet, providing novel opportunities for accelerating scientific
discoveries in the field of organismal biology, especially with the advent of
large vision-language models (VLMs). We ask if pre-trained VLMs can aid
scientists in answering a range of biologically relevant questions without any
additional fine-tuning. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of 12
state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs in the field of organismal biology using a novel
dataset, VLM4Bio, consisting of 469K question-answer pairs involving 30K images
from three groups of organisms: fishes, birds, and butterflies, covering five
biologically relevant tasks. We also explore the effects of applying prompting
techniques and tests for reasoning hallucination on the performance of VLMs,
shedding new light on the capabilities of current SOTA VLMs in answering
biologically relevant questions using images. The code and datasets for running
all the analyses reported in this paper can be found at
https://github.com/sammarfy/VLM4Bio.