CleverBirds: A Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Fine-grained Human Knowledge Tracing
Leonie Bossemeyer, Samuel Heinrich, Grant Van Horn, Oisin Mac Aodha
Fine-grained visual recognition, essential in many expert domains, often requires specialists years of dedicated training. Modeling the progression of such expertize remains challenging, and accurately inferring a 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 recognition. Collected by the citizen-science platform eBird, it offers insight into how individuals acquire expertize in complex fine-grained classification tasks. More than 40,000 participants have engaged in the quiz, answering over 17 million multiple-choice questions spanning 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 benchmarks 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.