A Lightweight and Explainable Vision-Language Framework for Crop Disease Visual Question Answering

Abstract: Visual question answering for crop disease analysis requires accurate visual understanding and reliable language generation. This work presents a lightweight vision-language framework for crop and disease identification from leaf images. The proposed approach combines a Swin Transformer vision encoder with sequence-to-sequence language decoders. A two-stage training strategy is adopted to improve visual representation learning and cross-modal alignment. The model is evaluated on a large-scale crop disease dataset using classification and natural language generation metrics. Experimental results show high accuracy for both crop and disease identification. The framework also achieves strong performance on BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore. Our proposed models outperform large-scale vision-language baselines while using significantly fewer parameters. Explainability is assessed using Grad-CAM and token-level attribution. Qualitative results demonstrate robust performance under diverse user-driven queries. These findings highlight the effectiveness of task-specific visual pretraining for crop disease visual question answering.