Does Your VFM Speak Plant? The Botanical Grammar of Vision Foundation Models for Object Detection

Abstract

Vision foundation models (VFMs) offer the promise of zero-shot object detection without task-specific training data, yet their performance in complex agricultural scenes remains highly sensitive to text prompt construction. We present a systematic prompt optimization framework evaluating four open-vocabulary detectors -- YOLO World, SAM3, Grounding DINO, and OWLv2 -- for cowpea flower and pod detection across synthetic and real field imagery. We decompose prompts into eight axes and conduct one-factor-at-a-time analysis followed by combinatorial optimization, revealing that models respond divergently to prompt structure: conditions that optimize one architecture can collapse another. Applying model-specific combinatorial prompts yields substantial gains over a naive species-name baseline, including +0.357 mAP@0.5 for YOLO World and +0.362 mAP@0.5 for OWLv2 on synthetic cowpea flower data. To evaluate cross-task generalization, we use an LLM to translate the discovered axis structure to a morphologically distinct target -- cowpea pods -- and compare against prompting using the discovered optimal structures from synthetic flower data. Crucially, prompt structures optimized exclusively on synthetic data transfer effectively to real-world fields: synthetic-pipeline prompts match or exceed those discovered on labeled real data for the majority of model-object combinations (flower: 0.374 vs. 0.353 for YOLO World; pod: 0.429 vs. 0.371 for SAM3). Our findings demonstrate that prompt engineering can substantially close the gap between zero-shot VFMs and supervised detectors without requiring manual annotation, and that optimal prompts are model-specific, non-obvious, and transferable across domains.