A Domain-Adapted Lightweight Ensemble for Resource-Efficient Few-Shot Plant Disease Classification

Accurate and timely identification of plant leaf diseases is essential for resilient and sustainable agriculture, yet most deep learning approaches rely on large annotated datasets and computationally intensive models that are unsuitable for data-scarce and resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges we present a few-shot learning approach within a lightweight yet efficient framework that combines domain-adapted MobileNetV2 and MobileNetV3 models as feature extractors, along with a feature fusion technique to generate robust feature representation. For the classification task, the fused features are passed through a Bi-LSTM classifier enhanced with attention mechanisms to capture sequential dependencies and focus on the most relevant features, thereby achieving optimal classification performance even in complex, real-world environments with noisy or cluttered backgrounds. The proposed framework was evaluated across multiple experimental setups, including both laboratory-controlled and field-captured datasets. On tomato leaf diseases from the PlantVillage dataset, it consistently improved performance across 1 to 15 shot scenarios, reaching 98.23+-0.33% at 15 shot, closely approaching the 99.98% SOTA benchmark achieved by a Transductive LSTM with attention, while remaining lightweight and mobile-friendly. Under real-world conditions using field images from the Dhan Shomadhan dataset, it maintained robust performance, reaching 69.28+-1.49% at 15-shot and demonstrating strong resilience to complex backgrounds. Notably, it also outperformed the previous SOTA accuracy of 96.0% on six diseases from PlantVillage, achieving 99.72% with only 15-shot learning. With a compact model size of approximately 40 MB and inference complexity of approximately 1.12 GFLOPs, this work establishes a scalable, mobile-ready foundation for precise plant disease diagnostics in data-scarce regions.

From n-gram to Attention: How Model Architectures Learn and Propagate Bias in Language Modeling

Current research on bias in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on data quality, with significantly less attention paid to model architecture and temporal influences of data. Even more critically, few studies systematically investigate the origins of bias. We propose a methodology grounded in comparative behavioral theory to interpret the complex interaction between training data and model architecture in bias propagation during language modeling. Building on recent work that relates transformers to n-gram LMs, we evaluate how data, model design choices, and temporal dynamics affect bias propagation. Our findings reveal that: (1) n-gram LMs are highly sensitive to context window size in bias propagation, while transformers demonstrate architectural robustness; (2) the temporal provenance of training data significantly affects bias; and (3) different model architectures respond differentially to controlled bias injection, with certain biases (e.g. sexual orientation) being disproportionately amplified. As language models become ubiquitous, our findings highlight the need for a holistic approach -- tracing bias to its origins across both data and model dimensions, not just symptoms, to mitigate harm.