What Do You See in Common? Learning Hierarchical Prototypes over Tree-of-Life to Discover Evolutionary Traits

A grand challenge in biology is to discover evolutionary traits - features of organisms common to a group of species with a shared ancestor in the tree of life (also referred to as phylogenetic tree). With the growing availability of image repositories in biology, there is a tremendous opportunity to discover evolutionary traits directly from images in the form of a hierarchy of prototypes. However, current prototype-based methods are mostly designed to operate over a flat structure of classes and face several challenges in discovering hierarchical prototypes, including the issue of learning over-specific prototypes at internal nodes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the framework of Hierarchy aligned Commonality through Prototypical Networks (HComP-Net). The key novelties in HComP-Net include a novel over-specificity loss to avoid learning over-specific prototypes, a novel discriminative loss to ensure prototypes at an internal node are absent in the contrasting set of species with different ancestry, and a novel masking module to allow for the exclusion of over-specific prototypes at higher levels of the tree without hampering classification performance. We empirically show that HComP-Net learns prototypes that are accurate, semantically consistent, and generalizable to unseen species in comparison to baselines.