AgriCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Agriculture and Livestock via Domain-Specialized Cross-Model Alignment

Capitalizing on a vast amount of image-text data, large-scale vision-language pre-training has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities and has been utilized in several applications. However, models trained on general everyday web-crawled data often exhibit suboptimal performance for specialized domains, likely due to domain shift. Recent works have tackled this problem for some domains (e.g., healthcare) by constructing domain-specialized image-text data. However, constructing a dedicated large-scale image-text dataset for sustainable areas of agriculture and livestock is still open to research. Further, this domain desires fine-grained feature learning due to the subtle nature of the downstream tasks (e.g., nutrient deficiency detection and livestock breed classification). To address this, we present AgriCLIP, a vision-language foundational model dedicated to the domain of agriculture and livestock. First, we propose a large-scale dataset named ALive that leverages a customized prompt generation strategy to overcome the scarcity of expert annotations. Our ALive dataset covers crops, livestock, and fishery, with around 600,000 image-text pairs. Second, we propose a training pipeline that integrates both contrastive and self-supervised learning to learn both global semantic and local fine-grained domain-specialized features. Experiments on a diverse set of 20 downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the AgriCLIP framework, achieving an absolute gain of 9.07% in terms of average zero-shot classification accuracy over the standard CLIP adaptation via domain-specialized ALive dataset. Our ALive dataset and code can be accessible at Github.