CleverBirds: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Fine-grained Human Knowledge Tracing

TL;DR

CleverBirds is a large-scale benchmark dataset designed to evaluate models' ability to trace and predict human knowledge progression in fine-grained bird species recognition through extensive multiple-choice quizzes.

Contribution

Introduces CleverBirds, a comprehensive dataset for visual knowledge tracing in fine-grained classification, enabling new research on learning patterns and individual differences.

Findings

Tracking knowledge is challenging across subgroups and question types.

Contextual information variably improves prediction accuracy.

CleverBirds is among the largest benchmarks for visual knowledge tracing.

Abstract

Mastering fine-grained visual recognition, essential in many expert domains, can require that specialists undergo years of dedicated training. Modeling the progression of such expertize in humans remains challenging, and accurately inferring a human learner's knowledge state is a key step toward understanding visual learning. We introduce CleverBirds, a large-scale knowledge tracing benchmark for fine-grained bird species recognition. Collected by the citizen-science platform eBird, it offers insight into how individuals acquire expertize in complex fine-grained classification. More than 40,000 participants have engaged in the quiz, answering over 17 million multiple-choice questions spanning over 10,000 bird species, with long-range learning patterns across an average of 400 questions per participant. We release this dataset to support the development and evaluation of new methods for visual knowledge tracing. We show that tracking learners' knowledge is challenging, especially across participant subgroups and question types, with different forms of contextual information offering varying degrees of predictive benefit. CleverBirds is among the largest benchmark of its kind, offering a substantially higher number of learnable concepts. With it, we hope to enable new avenues for studying the development of visual expertize over time and across individuals.