Net Zhang — accepted AI-conference papers

2026

BioCAP: Exploiting Synthetic Captions Beyond Labels in Biological Foundation Models

Ziheng Zhang, Xinyue Ma, Arpita Chowdhury, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Matthew J Thompson, Net Zhang +6

ICLR 2026poster

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during…

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2025

BioCLIP 2: Emergent Properties from Scaling Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

Jianyang Gu, Samuel Stevens, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Matthew J Thompson, Net Zhang, Jiaman Wu +10

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Foundation models trained at scale exhibit remarkable emergent behaviors, learning new capabilities beyond their initial training objectives. We find such emergent behaviors in biological vision models via large-scale contrastive vision-language training. To achieve this, we first curate TreeOfLife-…

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