# Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17809/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Towards Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02603/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19666/) (2024)
- [BIOMEDICA: An Open Biomedical Image-Caption Archive, Dataset, and Vision-Language Models Derived from Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07171/) (2025)
- [Pollen13K: A Large Scale Microscope Pollen Grain Image Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04690/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings, 45 genera, and one family-only taxon across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision--language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no detected taxon-name or numeric-size leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.