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Main Authors: Wu, Jing, Lai, Zhixin, Chen, Suiyao, Tao, Ran, Zhao, Pan, Hovakimyan, Naira
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19839
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author Wu, Jing
Lai, Zhixin
Chen, Suiyao
Tao, Ran
Zhao, Pan
Hovakimyan, Naira
author_facet Wu, Jing
Lai, Zhixin
Chen, Suiyao
Tao, Ran
Zhao, Pan
Hovakimyan, Naira
contents Crop management plays a crucial role in determining crop yield, economic profitability, and environmental sustainability. Despite the availability of management guidelines, optimizing these practices remains a complex and multifaceted challenge. In response, previous studies have explored using reinforcement learning with crop simulators, typically employing simple neural-network-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Building on this foundation, this paper introduces a more advanced intelligent crop management system. This system uniquely combines RL, a language model (LM), and crop simulations facilitated by the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT). We utilize deep RL, specifically a deep Q-network, to train management policies that process numerous state variables from the simulator as observations. A novel aspect of our approach is the conversion of these state variables into more informative language, facilitating the language model's capacity to understand states and explore optimal management practices. The empirical results reveal that the LM exhibits superior learning capabilities. Through simulation experiments with maize crops in Florida (US) and Zaragoza (Spain), the LM not only achieves state-of-the-art performance under various evaluation metrics but also demonstrates a remarkable improvement of over 49\% in economic profit, coupled with reduced environmental impact when compared to baseline methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/jingwu6/LM_AG}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_19839
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The New Agronomists: Language Models are Experts in Crop Management
Wu, Jing
Lai, Zhixin
Chen, Suiyao
Tao, Ran
Zhao, Pan
Hovakimyan, Naira
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Crop management plays a crucial role in determining crop yield, economic profitability, and environmental sustainability. Despite the availability of management guidelines, optimizing these practices remains a complex and multifaceted challenge. In response, previous studies have explored using reinforcement learning with crop simulators, typically employing simple neural-network-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Building on this foundation, this paper introduces a more advanced intelligent crop management system. This system uniquely combines RL, a language model (LM), and crop simulations facilitated by the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT). We utilize deep RL, specifically a deep Q-network, to train management policies that process numerous state variables from the simulator as observations. A novel aspect of our approach is the conversion of these state variables into more informative language, facilitating the language model's capacity to understand states and explore optimal management practices. The empirical results reveal that the LM exhibits superior learning capabilities. Through simulation experiments with maize crops in Florida (US) and Zaragoza (Spain), the LM not only achieves state-of-the-art performance under various evaluation metrics but also demonstrates a remarkable improvement of over 49\% in economic profit, coupled with reduced environmental impact when compared to baseline methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/jingwu6/LM_AG}.
title The New Agronomists: Language Models are Experts in Crop Management
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19839