FishDetectLLM: Multimodal instruction tuning with large language models for fish detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aquatic species play crucial roles in global ecosystems but are increasingly threatened by factors such as overfishing, coastal development and climate change . Existing deep learning methods address these challenges by employing powerful networks and large-scale, diverse datasets, separately tackling species recognition and trait identification during ongoing monitoring. However, they often exhibit limited generalization ability. Inspired by the human ability to quickly identify fish species and their locations with just a glance at an underwater image or scene, we introduce FishDetectLLM—a framework built on the lightweight TinyLLaVA architecture. FishDetectLLM utilizes the powerful reasoning capabilities and vast world knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to address the fish detection problem, providing both fish classification results and predicted bounding boxes for fish. Specifically, we create instruction dialogues for fish detection that connect fish taxonomy with classification descriptions and map location descriptions to the corresponding coordinates of bounding box in the input images from the recently released large-scale FishNet dataset. Then, we pretrain and fine-tune FishDetectLLM to achieve fish detection using the created dataset, leveraging the principle of augmenting human knowledge. Our results show that FishDetectLLM significantly outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and task-specific methods. Unlike conventional detection architectures that struggle to generalize beyond the training data, FishDetectLLM exhibits strong generalization capabilities, achieving robust performance on unseen data. This innovation paves the way for future applications of MLLMs in full research and offers valuable tools for the conservation of fish biodiversity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".