CSIRO Pasture Biomass Prediction (4th Place Solution)

This model card covers the main and auxiliary models used in the Kaggle CSIRO Pasture Biomass Prediction competition (4th place). The solution uses a ViT-Huge DINOv3 backbone with multi-modal fusion and an auxiliary pretraining stage.
Model Description
Main model (Stage 1)
- Backbone:
vit_huge_plus_patch16_dinov3.lvd1689m (DINOv3)
- Input: RGB pasture image + tabular features (
Pre_GSHH_NDVI, Height_Ave_cm)
- Output: Biomass regression targets
- Loss: Weighted Smooth L1 with weights
[0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5]
Aux model (Stage 2)
- Input: RGB pasture image only
- Output: Predicts tabular features (NDVI, Height)
- Purpose: Feature enrichment for the main model
Model Weights
Intended Use
- Research and benchmarking for pasture biomass regression from aerial/ground images.
- Demonstration of multi-modal fusion and auxiliary prediction benefits.
Out-of-Scope Use
- Medical or safety-critical applications.
- Real-time decision systems without domain validation.
Training Data
- Kaggle CSIRO Pasture Biomass Prediction dataset.
- Images were manually cropped to remove cardboard background.
Preprocessing
- Manual cropping to remove cardboard borders.
- Tabular features and regression targets normalized via
StandardScaler.
- Image size: 800×800.
Training Configuration
Stage 1 (Main Model)
- Batch size: 10
- Optimizer: AdamW
- LR: 5e-5
- Scheduler: CosineAnnealingWarmRestarts (T_0=10, T_mult=2, eta_min=1e-6)
- 5-fold CV (Seed 42)
Stage 2 (Aux Model)
- Batch size: 8
- Optimizer: AdamW
- LR: 5e-5
- Scheduler: ReduceLROnPlateau (factor=0.5, patience=4)
- 5-fold CV (Seed 44)
Results
| Stage |
Public LB |
Private LB |
| Baseline |
0.74 |
0.64 |
| + Data Cleaning |
0.75 |
0.65 |
| + Auxiliary Training |
0.76 |
0.66 |
Limitations
- Trained on competition data with specific capture setup; generalization to other pasture imagery may vary.
- Large ViT-Huge backbone is compute-intensive.
Ethical Considerations
- Dataset-specific biases may affect generalization.
- Manual preprocessing may not be reproducible without the same data access.
Citation
If you use these weights, please cite the Kaggle competition solution.
License
MIT