Automatic Image-Level Morphological Trait Annotation for Organismal Images

arXiv:2604.01619v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Morphological traits are physical characteristics of biological organisms that provide vital clues on how organisms interact with their environment. Yet extracting these traits remains a slow, expert-driven process, limiting their use in large-scale ecological studies. A major bottleneck is the absence of high-quality datasets linking biological images to trait-level annotations. In this work, we demonstrate that sparse autoencoders train