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tree of life

The tree of life is a biological model and metaphor that represents the evolutionary relationships and shared ancestry of all known living and extinct organisms on Earth. Rooted in the principle of common descent, it illustrates how diverse forms of life branched over geological time from shared ancestors into distinct domains, kingdoms, and lineages, including animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Modern scientists reconstruct this branching hierarchy using genetic, fossil, and anatomical evidence, providing a foundational framework for organizing biological taxonomy, tracing evolutionary pathways, and understanding the full scope of Earth biodiversity.

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BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life

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 V. Stewart, Tanya Y. Berger-Wolf, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su

OrganizationsMicrosoftRensselaer Polytechnic InstituteThe Ohio State UniversityUniversity of California, Irvine

Why you should read this

Introduces BioCLIP, a vision foundation model trained on a 10-million-image biological dataset aligned with taxonomic hierarchies, achieving superior fine-grained classification and zero-shot generalization across diverse organismal groups compared to standard vision models.

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 16% to 17% absolute). Intrinsic evaluation reveals that BioCLIP has learned a hierarchical representation conforming to the tree of life, shedding light on its strong generalizability.

Added

2026-09-26