AgriScope: Pixel-Grounded Multimodal Understanding for Agricultural Images

Agricultural image understanding requires fine-grained recognition of plant diseases, pests, crop structures, and botanical species under complex real-world conditions. Despite recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing models remain limited to text-only outputs and lack pixel-level visual grounding capabilities. In this work, we introduce AgriScope, a unified pixel-grounded multimodal framework for agricultural image understanding. AgriScope jointly supports image-level, region-level, and pixel-level understanding within a unified framework, enabling tasks such as grounded caption generation, referring expression segmentation, and multi-turn multimodal interaction for agricultural imagery. AgriScope integrates biologically specialized semantic representations with dense spatial grounding through biological-semantic encoding, dense spatial representations, and pixel decoding. To support large-scale grounded learning, we introduce AgriGround, a large-scale pixel-grounded agricultural multimodal instruction-tuning dataset containing over 500K images and 11M instruction-following samples spanning plant disease analysis, crop and weed identification, insect pest recognition, and fine-grained botanical understanding. AgriGround is constructed through a multi-stage automatic annotation pipeline that integrates multimodal caption generation, phrase-level grounding, segmentation mask generation, and task-oriented instruction synthesis to produce densely grounded supervision. Extensive experiments across multiple agricultural vision-language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of AgriScope in pixel-grounded multimodal understanding, establishing a strong benchmark for agricultural vision-language learning and visual grounding. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at (https://github.com/boudiafA/AgriScope)