# Fusion Complexity Is Not Fusion Quality: Backbone, Cross View Fusion and Metadata as Separate Factors in Pasture Biomass Regression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07819 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07819/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04856/) (2023)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [Estimating Pasture Biomass from Top-View Images: A Dataset for Precision Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22916/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating pasture biomass from field images can support grazing decisions without repeated destructive sampling. The task remains difficult because available datasets are small, biomass components are imbalanced and a single photograph contains two spatially distinct views of the sampled quadrat. This work evaluates vision foundation models for five target pasture biomass regression on the 357 image CSIRO dataset. Across 25 model configurations, the analysis covers convolutional and self supervised transformer backbones, seven cross view fusion configurations, models with and without 23 metadata features, classical regressors and frozen foundation features. All comparisons use one locked five fold split and raw scale weighted R^2. DINOv3 Large with cross view gated attention gives the strongest verified single model result, 0.8338 +/- 0.0503 across folds. Under a matched gated depthwise convolution head, replacing DINOv2 Large with DINOv3 Large improves R^2 by 0.0372. Fusion results are not ordered by module complexity. Cross view gated attention is best, while a full Mamba fusion block reaches only 0.7930. Across four matched DINOv3 pathways, metadata narrows the score range from 0.0157 to 0.0013 while changing the mean by only +0.0034. It improves three weaker pathways but lowers the strongest attention model by 0.0061. Classical metadata models are strong, frozen DINOv3 features are linearly useful and Dry Dead biomass remains the hardest target. These results show that backbone choice, cross view interaction and metadata must be tested as separate factors on small agricultural datasets.