# Towards Ancient Plant Seed Classification: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [Long-Tailed Recognition via Weight Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14197/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Progressive Multi-Granularity Training of Jigsaw Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03836/) (2020)
- [GhostNetV2: Enhance Cheap Operation with Long-Range Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12905/) (2022)
- [2DMamba: Efficient State Space Model for Image Representation with Applications on Giga-Pixel Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00678/) (2024)
- [SeaFormer++: Squeeze-enhanced Axial Transformer for Mobile Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13156/) (2023)
- [GhostNetV3: Exploring the Training Strategies for Compact Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11202/) (2024)
- [TCFormer: Visual Recognition via Token Clustering Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11321/) (2024)
- [Multi-Granularity Archaeological Dating of Chinese Bronze Dings Based on a Knowledge-Guided Relation Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15266/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [G2HFNet: GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12680/) (2026)
- [RSONet: Region-guided Selective Optimization Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12685/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding the dietary preferences of ancient societies and their evolution across periods and regions is crucial for revealing human-environment interactions. Seeds, as important archaeological artifacts, represent a fundamental subject of archaeobotanical research. However, traditional studies rely heavily on expert knowledge, which is often time-consuming and inefficient. Intelligent analysis methods have made progress in various fields of archaeology, but there remains a research gap in data and methods in archaeobotany, especially in the classification task of ancient plant seeds. To address this, we construct the first Ancient Plant Seed Image Classification (APS) dataset. It contains 8,340 images from 17 genus- or species-level seed categories excavated from 18 archaeological sites across China. In addition, we design a framework specifically for the ancient plant seed classification task (APSNet), which introduces the scale feature (size) of seeds based on learning fine-grained information to guide the network in discovering key "evidence" for sufficient classification. Specifically, we design a Size Perception and Embedding (SPE) module in the encoder part to explicitly extract size information for the purpose of complementing fine-grained information. We propose an Asynchronous Decoupled Decoding (ADD) architecture based on traditional progressive learning to decode features from both channel and spatial perspectives, enabling efficient learning of discriminative features. In both quantitative and qualitative analyses, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art image classification methods, achieving an accuracy of 90.5%. This demonstrates that our work provides an effective tool for large-scale, systematic archaeological research.