# Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Microscopic Plant Image Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22497/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agricultural vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 28 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Agricultural vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/agricultural-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03169/) (2016)
- [PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Vision Language Models for Specialized Agricultural Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19617/) (2024)
- [AgroBench: Vision-Language Model Benchmark in Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20519/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking In-the-wild Multimodal Disease Recognition and A Versatile Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03120/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset and Model for Crop Disease Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06973/) (2025)
- [PlantSeg: A Large-Scale In-the-wild Dataset for Plant Disease Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04038/) (2024)
- [MIRAGE: A Benchmark for Multimodal Information-Seeking and Reasoning in Agricultural Expert-Guided Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20100/) (2025)
- [Snap and Diagnose: An Advanced Multimodal Retrieval System for Identifying Plant Diseases in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14723/) (2024)
- [Crop identification using deep learning on LUCAS crop cover photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04994/) (2023)
- [Track Any Peppers: Weakly Supervised Sweet Pepper Tracking Using VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06702/) (2024)
- [Augment to Segment: Tackling Pixel-Level Imbalance in Wheat Disease and Pest Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09961/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Microscopic imaging provides essential visual evidence for studying plant biology and pathology at the cellular and subcellular levels. However, existing benchmarks on vision-language models primarily focus on macroscopic plant imagery, while the microscopic domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present PlantMicro, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in microscopic plant imagery. PlantMicro integrates more than 5,000 images collected across diverse hosts, biological domains, and imaging modalities. Building on this diversity, we design a set of complementary tasks that capture different facets of microscopic image understanding. To support these tasks, we construct over 9,000 VQA pairs that systematically evaluate the capabilities of VLMs. Experiments on PlantMicro show that current VLMs struggle with fine-grained recognition and biologically grounded reasoning. For example, GPT-5 achieves 34.93% accuracy on the pathogen classification task, which is only modestly above the random-guessing baseline. The results highlight a significant gap in current VLMs' ability to comprehend plant microscopic images. PlantMicro provides a standardized foundation for advancing VLMs toward reliable and comprehensive microscopy-level plant understanding.