AgriChain: Visually-Grounded Expert-Verified Reasoning for Interpretable Agricultural Vision–Language Models

Hazza Mahmood, Yongqiang Yu, Rao Anwer


Abstract
Accurate and interpretable plant disease diagnosis remains a key challenge for vision–language models in real agricultural settings. We present AgriChain, a new dataset of around 11,000 expert-curated leaf images covering a wide range of crops and diseases. Each image is paired with a disease label, a calibrated confidence score, and an expert-verified chain-of-thought explanation. Draft rationales were first generated by GPT-4o and then refined by a professional agricultural engineer using standard descriptors such as lesion color, margin, and distribution. Using these data, we fine-tune the open vision–language model Qwen-2.5-VL-3B to jointly identify diseases and explain its reasoning in a way that mirrors expert thinking. On a 1,000-image test set, our model reaches 73.1% accuracy and produces explanations that align closely with human expertise. These results show that expert-verified reasoning supervision enhances both performance and interpretability, bringing us closer to transparent and trustworthy AI tools for sustainable agriculture.To support reproducibility and further research, the dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/hazzanabeel12-netizen/agrichain.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.177
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2268–2276
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-177
DOI:
10.63317/2bv5k9hnduop
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hazza Mahmood, Yongqiang Yu, and Rao Anwer. 2026. AgriChain: Visually-Grounded Expert-Verified Reasoning for Interpretable Agricultural Vision–Language Models. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2268–2276, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
AgriChain: Visually-Grounded Expert-Verified Reasoning for Interpretable Agricultural Vision–Language Models (Mahmood et al., LREC 2026)
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