A Two-Stage Multitask Vision-Language Framework for Explainable Crop Disease Visual Question Answering

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Main Authors: Hossain, Md. Zahid, Samu, Most. Sharmin Sultana, Islam, Md. Rakibul, Ansary, Md. Siam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hossain, Md. Zahid
Samu, Most. Sharmin Sultana
Islam, Md. Rakibul
Ansary, Md. Siam
author_facet Hossain, Md. Zahid
Samu, Most. Sharmin Sultana
Islam, Md. Rakibul
Ansary, Md. Siam
contents Visual question answering (VQA) for crop disease analysis requires accurate visual understanding and reliable language generation. In this work, we present a lightweight and explainable vision-language framework for crop and disease identification from leaf images. The proposed approach integrates a Swin Transformer vision encoder with sequence-to-sequence language decoders. The vision encoder is first trained in a multitask setup for both plant and disease classification, and then frozen while the text decoders are trained, forming a two-stage training strategy that enhances visual representation learning and cross-modal alignment. We evaluate the model on the large-scale Crop Disease Domain Multimodal (CDDM) dataset using both classification and natural language generation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate near-perfect recognition performance, achieving 99.94% plant classification accuracy and 99.06% disease classification accuracy, along with strong BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore results. Without fine-tuning, the model further generalizes well to the external PlantVillageVQA benchmark, achieving 83.18% micro accuracy in the VQA task. Our lightweight design outperforms larger vision-language baselines while using significantly fewer parameters. Explainability is assessed through Grad-CAM and token-level attribution, providing interpretable visual and textual evidence for predictions. Qualitative results demonstrate robust performance under diverse user-driven queries, highlighting the effectiveness of task-specific visual pretraining and the two-stage training methodology for crop disease visual question answering. An interactive demo of the proposed Swin-T5 model is publicly available as a Gradio-based application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Zahid16/PlantDiseaseVQAwithSwinT5 for community use.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Two-Stage Multitask Vision-Language Framework for Explainable Crop Disease Visual Question Answering
Hossain, Md. Zahid
Samu, Most. Sharmin Sultana
Islam, Md. Rakibul
Ansary, Md. Siam
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Visual question answering (VQA) for crop disease analysis requires accurate visual understanding and reliable language generation. In this work, we present a lightweight and explainable vision-language framework for crop and disease identification from leaf images. The proposed approach integrates a Swin Transformer vision encoder with sequence-to-sequence language decoders. The vision encoder is first trained in a multitask setup for both plant and disease classification, and then frozen while the text decoders are trained, forming a two-stage training strategy that enhances visual representation learning and cross-modal alignment. We evaluate the model on the large-scale Crop Disease Domain Multimodal (CDDM) dataset using both classification and natural language generation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate near-perfect recognition performance, achieving 99.94% plant classification accuracy and 99.06% disease classification accuracy, along with strong BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore results. Without fine-tuning, the model further generalizes well to the external PlantVillageVQA benchmark, achieving 83.18% micro accuracy in the VQA task. Our lightweight design outperforms larger vision-language baselines while using significantly fewer parameters. Explainability is assessed through Grad-CAM and token-level attribution, providing interpretable visual and textual evidence for predictions. Qualitative results demonstrate robust performance under diverse user-driven queries, highlighting the effectiveness of task-specific visual pretraining and the two-stage training methodology for crop disease visual question answering. An interactive demo of the proposed Swin-T5 model is publicly available as a Gradio-based application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Zahid16/PlantDiseaseVQAwithSwinT5 for community use.
title A Two-Stage Multitask Vision-Language Framework for Explainable Crop Disease Visual Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05143