[D] Why I abandoned YOLO for safety critical plant/fungi identification. Closed-set classification is a silent failure mode

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I’ve been building an open-sourced handheld device for field identification of edible and toxic plants wild plants, and fungi, running entirely on device. Early on I trained specialist YOLO models on iNaturalist research grade data and hit 94-96% accuracy across my target species. Felt great, until I discovered a problem I don’t see discussed enough on this sub.</p> <p>YOLO’s closed set architecture has no concept of “I don’t know.” Feed it an out of distribution image and it will confidently classify it as one of its classes at near 100% confidence. In most CV cases this can be annoyance. In foraging, it’s potentially lethal.</p> <p>I tried confidence threshold fine-tuning at first, doesn’t work. The confidence scores on OOD inputs are indistinguishable f