arXiv cs.AIPaper
Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?
Edge-deployable VLMs show genuine taxonomic knowledge but can't handle real-world image quality drops. If you're building field-deployed systems using small VLMs, this is a heads-up that domain shift is the blocker, not model capacity. BioCLIP's specialist training doesn't fix it either, which suggests the problem is feature brittleness, not model choice.