Daily Papers

Accurate crop yield prediction is of utmost importance for informed decision-making in agriculture, aiding farmers, and industry stakeholders. However, this task is complex and depends on multiple factors, such as environmental conditions, soil properties, and management practices. Combining heterogeneous data views poses a fusion challenge, like identifying the view-specific contribution to the predictive task. We present a novel multi-view learning approach to predict crop yield for different crops (soybean, wheat, rapeseed) and regions (Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany). Our multi-view input data includes multi-spectral optical images from Sentinel-2 satellites and weather data as dynamic features during the crop growing season, complemented by static features like soil properties and topographic information. To effectively fuse the data, we introduce a Multi-view Gated Fusion (MVGF) model, comprising dedicated view-encoders and a Gated Unit (GU) module. The view-encoders handle the heterogeneity of data sources with varying temporal resolutions by learning a view-specific representation. These representations are adaptively fused via a weighted sum. The fusion weights are computed for each sample by the GU using a concatenation of the view-representations. The MVGF model is trained at sub-field level with 10 m resolution pixels. Our evaluations show that the MVGF outperforms conventional models on the same task, achieving the best results by incorporating all the data sources, unlike the usual fusion results in the literature. For Argentina, the MVGF model achieves an R2 value of 0.68 at sub-field yield prediction, while at field level evaluation (comparing field averages), it reaches around 0.80 across different countries. The GU module learned different weights based on the country and crop-type, aligning with the variable significance of each data source to the prediction task.

Precise crop yield predictions are of national importance for ensuring food security and sustainable agricultural practices. While AI-for-science approaches have exhibited promising achievements in solving many scientific problems such as drug discovery, precipitation nowcasting, etc., the development of deep learning models for predicting crop yields is constantly hindered by the lack of an open and large-scale deep learning-ready dataset with multiple modalities to accommodate sufficient information. To remedy this, we introduce the CropNet dataset, the first terabyte-sized, publicly available, and multi-modal dataset specifically targeting climate change-aware crop yield predictions for the contiguous United States (U.S.) continent at the county level. Our CropNet dataset is composed of three modalities of data, i.e., Sentinel-2 Imagery, WRF-HRRR Computed Dataset, and USDA Crop Dataset, for over 2200 U.S. counties spanning 6 years (2017-2022), expected to facilitate researchers in developing versatile deep learning models for timely and precisely predicting crop yields at the county-level, by accounting for the effects of both short-term growing season weather variations and long-term climate change on crop yields. Besides, we develop the CropNet package, offering three types of APIs, for facilitating researchers in downloading the CropNet data on the fly over the time and region of interest, and flexibly building their deep learning models for accurate crop yield predictions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on our CropNet dataset via employing various types of deep learning solutions, with the results validating the general applicability and the efficacy of the CropNet dataset in climate change-aware crop yield predictions.

Accurate remote sensing-based crop yield prediction remains a fundamental challenging task due to complex spatial patterns, heterogeneous spectral characteristics, and dynamic agricultural conditions. Existing methods often suffer from limited spatial modeling capacity, weak generalization across crop types and years. To address these challenges, we propose DFYP, a novel Dynamic Fusion framework for crop Yield Prediction, which combines spectral channel attention, edge-adaptive spatial modeling and a learnable fusion mechanism to improve robustness across diverse agricultural scenarios. Specifically, DFYP introduces three key components: (1) a Resolution-aware Channel Attention (RCA) module that enhances spectral representation by adaptively reweighting input channels based on resolution-specific characteristics; (2) an Adaptive Operator Learning Network (AOL-Net) that dynamically selects operators for convolutional kernels to improve edge-sensitive spatial feature extraction under varying crop and temporal conditions; and (3) a dual-branch architecture with a learnable fusion mechanism, which jointly models local spatial details and global contextual information to support cross-resolution and cross-crop generalization. Extensive experiments on multi-year datasets MODIS and multi-crop dataset Sentinel-2 demonstrate that DFYP consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines in RMSE, MAE, and R2 across different spatial resolutions, crop types, and time periods, showcasing its effectiveness and robustness for real-world agricultural monitoring.

We introduce a simple yet effective early fusion method for crop yield prediction that handles multiple input modalities with different temporal and spatial resolutions. We use high-resolution crop yield maps as ground truth data to train crop and machine learning model agnostic methods at the sub-field level. We use Sentinel-2 satellite imagery as the primary modality for input data with other complementary modalities, including weather, soil, and DEM data. The proposed method uses input modalities available with global coverage, making the framework globally scalable. We explicitly highlight the importance of input modalities for crop yield prediction and emphasize that the best-performing combination of input modalities depends on region, crop, and chosen model.

Precise crop yield prediction is essential for improving agricultural practices and ensuring crop resilience in varying climates. Integrating weather data across the growing season, especially for different crop varieties, is crucial for understanding their adaptability in the face of climate change. In the MLCAS2021 Crop Yield Prediction Challenge, we utilized a dataset comprising 93,028 training records to forecast yields for 10,337 test records, covering 159 locations across 28 U.S. states and Canadian provinces over 13 years (2003-2015). This dataset included details on 5,838 distinct genotypes and daily weather data for a 214-day growing season, enabling comprehensive analysis. As one of the winning teams, we developed two novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: the CNN-DNN model, combining CNN and fully-connected networks, and the CNN-LSTM-DNN model, with an added LSTM layer for weather variables. Leveraging the Generalized Ensemble Method (GEM), we determined optimal model weights, resulting in superior performance compared to baseline models. The GEM model achieved lower RMSE (5.55% to 39.88%), reduced MAE (5.34% to 43.76%), and higher correlation coefficients (1.1% to 10.79%) when evaluated on test data. We applied the CNN-DNN model to identify top-performing genotypes for various locations and weather conditions, aiding genotype selection based on weather variables. Our data-driven approach is valuable for scenarios with limited testing years. Additionally, a feature importance analysis using RMSE change highlighted the significance of location, MG, year, and genotype, along with the importance of weather variables MDNI and AP.

Accurate plant counting provides valuable information for agriculture such as crop yield prediction, plant density assessment, and phenotype quantification. Vision-based approaches are currently the mainstream solution. Prior art typically uses a detection or a regression model to count a specific plant. However, plants have biodiversity, and new cultivars are increasingly bred each year. It is almost impossible to exhaust and build all species-dependent counting models. Inspired by class-agnostic counting (CAC) in computer vision, we argue that it is time to rethink the problem formulation of plant counting, from what plants to count to how to count plants. In contrast to most daily objects with spatial and temporal invariance, plants are dynamic, changing with time and space. Their non-rigid structure often leads to worse performance than counting rigid instances like heads and cars such that current CAC and open-world detection models are suboptimal to count plants. In this work, we inherit the vein of the TasselNet plant counting model and introduce a new extension, TasselNetV4, shifting from species-specific counting to cross-species counting. TasselNetV4 marries the local counting idea of TasselNet with the extract-and-match paradigm in CAC. It builds upon a plain vision transformer and incorporates novel multi-branch box-aware local counters used to enhance cross-scale robustness. Two challenging datasets, PAC-105 and PAC-Somalia, are harvested. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art CAC models show that TasselNetV4 achieves not only superior counting performance but also high efficiency.Our results indicate that TasselNetV4 emerges to be a vision foundation model for cross-scene, cross-scale, and cross-species plant counting.

Diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results on many modalities including images, speech, and video. However, existing models are not tailored to support remote sensing data, which is widely used in important applications including environmental monitoring and crop-yield prediction. Satellite images are significantly different from natural images -- they can be multi-spectral, irregularly sampled across time -- and existing diffusion models trained on images from the Web do not support them. Furthermore, remote sensing data is inherently spatio-temporal, requiring conditional generation tasks not supported by traditional methods based on captions or images. In this paper, we present DiffusionSat, to date the largest generative foundation model trained on a collection of publicly available large, high-resolution remote sensing datasets. As text-based captions are sparsely available for satellite images, we incorporate the associated metadata such as geolocation as conditioning information. Our method produces realistic samples and can be used to solve multiple generative tasks including temporal generation, superresolution given multi-spectral inputs and in-painting. Our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for satellite image generation and is the first large-scale generative foundation model for satellite imagery.

Measuring soil health indicators is an important and challenging task that affects farmers' decisions on timing, placement, and quantity of fertilizers applied in the farms. Most existing methods to measure soil health indicators (SHIs) are in-lab wet chemistry or spectroscopy-based methods, which require significant human input and effort, time-consuming, costly, and are low-throughput in nature. To address this challenge, we develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven near real-time unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multispectral sensing (UMS) solution to estimate total nitrogen (TN) of the soil, an important macro-nutrient or SHI that directly affects the crop health. Accurate prediction of soil TN can significantly increase crop yield through informed decision making on the timing of seed planting, and fertilizer quantity and timing. We train two machine learning models including multi-layer perceptron and support vector machine to predict the soil nitrogen using a suite of data classes including multispectral characteristics of the soil and crops in red, near-infrared, and green spectral bands, computed vegetation indices, and environmental variables including air temperature and relative humidity. To generate the ground-truth data or the training data for the machine learning models, we measure the total nitrogen of the soil samples (collected from a farm) using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS).

Agricultural applications such as yield prediction, precision agriculture and automated harvesting need systems able to infer the crop state from low-cost sensing devices. Proximal sensing using affordable cameras combined with computer vision has seen a promising alternative, strengthened after the advent of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as an alternative for challenging pattern recognition problems in natural images. Considering fruit growing monitoring and automation, a fundamental problem is the detection, segmentation and counting of individual fruits in orchards. Here we show that for wine grapes, a crop presenting large variability in shape, color, size and compactness, grape clusters can be successfully detected, segmented and tracked using state-of-the-art CNNs. In a test set containing 408 grape clusters from images taken on a trellis-system based vineyard, we have reached an F 1 -score up to 0.91 for instance segmentation, a fine separation of each cluster from other structures in the image that allows a more accurate assessment of fruit size and shape. We have also shown as clusters can be identified and tracked along video sequences recording orchard rows. We also present a public dataset containing grape clusters properly annotated in 300 images and a novel annotation methodology for segmentation of complex objects in natural images. The presented pipeline for annotation, training, evaluation and tracking of agricultural patterns in images can be replicated for different crops and production systems. It can be employed in the development of sensing components for several agricultural and environmental applications.

California is a global leader in agricultural production, contributing 12.5% of the United States total output and ranking as the fifth-largest food and cotton supplier in the world. Despite the availability of extensive historical yield data from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, accurate and timely crop yield forecasting remains a challenge due to the complex interplay of environmental, climatic, and soil-related factors. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive crop yield benchmark dataset covering over 70 crops across all California counties from 2008 to 2022. The benchmark integrates diverse data sources, including Landsat satellite imagery, daily climate records, monthly evapotranspiration, and high-resolution soil properties. To effectively learn from these heterogeneous inputs, we develop a multi-modal deep learning model tailored for county-level, crop-specific yield forecasting. The model employs stratified feature extraction and a timeseries encoder to capture spatial and temporal dynamics during the growing season. Static inputs such as soil characteristics and crop identity inform long-term variability. Our approach achieves an overall R2 score of 0.76 across all crops of unseen test dataset, highlighting strong predictive performance across California diverse agricultural regions. This benchmark and modeling framework offer a valuable foundation for advancing agricultural forecasting, climate adaptation, and precision farming. The full dataset and codebase are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

We propose a deep learning methodology for multivariate regression that is based on pattern recognition that triggers fast learning over sensor data. We used a conversion of sensors-to-image which enables us to take advantage of Computer Vision architectures and training processes. In addition to this data preparation methodology, we explore the use of state-of-the-art architectures to generate regression outputs to predict agricultural crop continuous yield information. Finally, we compare with some of the top models reported in MLCAS2021. We found that using a straightforward training process, we were able to accomplish an MAE of 4.394, RMSE of 5.945, and R^2 of 0.861.

Vision-driven field monitoring is central to digital agriculture, yet models built on general-domain pretrained backbones often fail to generalize across tasks, owing to the interaction of fine, variable canopy structures with fluctuating field conditions. We present FoMo4Wheat, one of the first crop-domain vision foundation model pretrained with self-supervision on ImAg4Wheat, the largest and most diverse wheat image dataset to date (2.5 million high-resolution images collected over a decade at 30 global sites, spanning >2,000 genotypes and >500 environmental conditions). This wheat-specific pretraining yields representations that are robust for wheat and transferable to other crops and weeds. Across ten in-field vision tasks at canopy and organ levels, FoMo4Wheat models consistently outperform state-of-the-art models pretrained on general-domain dataset. These results demonstrate the value of crop-specific foundation models for reliable in-field perception and chart a path toward a universal crop foundation model with cross-species and cross-task capabilities. FoMo4Wheat models and the ImAg4Wheat dataset are publicly available online: https://github.com/PheniX-Lab/FoMo4Wheat and https://huggingface.co/PheniX-Lab/FoMo4Wheat. The demonstration website is: https://fomo4wheat.phenix-lab.com/.

Remote sensing has emerged as a critical tool for large-scale Earth monitoring and land management. In this paper, we introduce AgriPotential, a novel benchmark dataset composed of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery spanning multiple months. The dataset provides pixel-level annotations of agricultural potentials for three major crop types - viticulture, market gardening, and field crops - across five ordinal classes. AgriPotential supports a broad range of machine learning tasks, including ordinal regression, multi-label classification, and spatio-temporal modeling. The data covers diverse areas in Southern France, offering rich spectral information. AgriPotential is the first public dataset designed specifically for agricultural potential prediction, aiming to improve data-driven approaches to sustainable land use planning. The dataset and the code are freely accessible at: https://zenodo.org/records/15556484

As global fertilizer application rates increase, high-quality datasets are paramount for comprehensive analyses to support informed decision-making and policy formulation in crucial areas such as food security or climate change. This study aims to fill existing data gaps by employing two machine learning models, eXtreme Gradient Boosting and HistGradientBoosting algorithms to produce precise country-level predictions of nitrogen (N), phosphorus pentoxide (P_2O_5), and potassium oxide (K_2O) application rates. Subsequently, we created a comprehensive dataset of 5-arcmin resolution maps depicting the application rates of each fertilizer for 13 major crop groups from 1961 to 2019. The predictions were validated by both comparing with existing databases and by assessing the drivers of fertilizer application rates using the model's SHapley Additive exPlanations. This extensive dataset is poised to be a valuable resource for assessing fertilization trends, identifying the socioeconomic, agricultural, and environmental drivers of fertilizer application rates, and serving as an input for various applications, including environmental modeling, causal analysis, fertilizer price predictions, and forecasting.

The Bhutanese government is increasing its utilization of technological approaches such as including Remote Sensing-based knowledge in their decision-making process. This study focuses on crop type and crop extent in Paro, one of the top rice-yielding districts in Bhutan, and employs publicly available NICFI high-resolution satellite imagery from Planet. Two Deep Learning (DL) approaches, point-based (DNN) and patch-based (U-Net), models were used in conjunction with cloud-computing platforms. Three different models per DL approaches (DNN and U-Net) were trained: 1) RGBN channels from Planet; 2) RGBN and elevation data (RGBNE); 3) RGBN and Sentinel-1 (S1) data (RGBNS), and RGBN with E and S1 data (RGBNES). From this comprehensive analysis, the U-Net displayed higher performance metrics across both model training and model validation efforts. Among the U-Net model sets, the RGBN, RGBNE, RGBNS, and RGBNES models had an F1-score of 0.8546, 0.8563, 0.8467, and 0.8500 respectively. An independent model evaluation was performed and found a high level of performance variation across all the metrics. For this independent model evaluation, the U-Net RGBN, RGBNE, RGBNES, and RGBN models displayed the F1-scores of 0.5935, 0.6154, 0.5882, and 0.6582, suggesting U-Net RGBNES as the best model. The study shows that the DL approaches can predict rice. Also, DL methods can be used with the survey-based approaches currently utilized by the Bhutan Department of Agriculture. Further, this study demonstrated the usage of regional land cover products such as SERVIR's RLCMS as a weak label approach to capture different strata addressing the class imbalance problem and improving the sampling design for DL application. Finally, through preliminary model testing and comparisons outlined it was shown that using additional features such as NDVI, EVI, and NDWI did not drastically improve model performance.

Wheat management strategies play a critical role in determining yield. Traditional management decisions often rely on labour-intensive expert inspections, which are expensive, subjective and difficult to scale. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as a promising solution to enable scalable, data-driven management support. However, due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge, directly applying VLMs to wheat management tasks results in poor quantification and reasoning capabilities, ultimately producing vague or even misleading management recommendations. In response, we propose WisWheat, a wheat-specific dataset with a three-layered design to enhance VLM performance on wheat management tasks: (1) a foundational pretraining dataset of 47,871 image-caption pairs for coarsely adapting VLMs to wheat morphology; (2) a quantitative dataset comprising 7,263 VQA-style image-question-answer triplets for quantitative trait measuring tasks; and (3) an Instruction Fine-tuning dataset with 4,888 samples targeting biotic and abiotic stress diagnosis and management plan for different phenological stages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning open-source VLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5 7B) on our dataset leads to significant performance improvements. Specifically, the Qwen2.5 VL 7B fine-tuned on our wheat instruction dataset achieves accuracy scores of 79.2% and 84.6% on wheat stress and growth stage conversation tasks respectively, surpassing even general-purpose commercial models such as GPT-4o by a margin of 11.9% and 34.6%.

Precise automated understanding of agricultural tasks such as disease identification is essential for sustainable crop production. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to further expand the range of agricultural tasks by facilitating human-model interaction through easy, text-based communication. Here, we introduce AgroBench (Agronomist AI Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating VLM models across seven agricultural topics, covering key areas in agricultural engineering and relevant to real-world farming. Unlike recent agricultural VLM benchmarks, AgroBench is annotated by expert agronomists. Our AgroBench covers a state-of-the-art range of categories, including 203 crop categories and 682 disease categories, to thoroughly evaluate VLM capabilities. In our evaluation on AgroBench, we reveal that VLMs have room for improvement in fine-grained identification tasks. Notably, in weed identification, most open-source VLMs perform close to random. With our wide range of topics and expert-annotated categories, we analyze the types of errors made by VLMs and suggest potential pathways for future VLM development. Our dataset and code are available at https://dahlian00.github.io/AgroBenchPage/ .

Studying and analyzing cropland is a difficult task due to its dynamic and heterogeneous growth behavior. Usually, diverse data sources can be collected for its estimation. Although deep learning models have proven to excel in the crop classification task, they face substantial challenges when dealing with multiple inputs, named Multi-View Learning (MVL). The methods used in the MVL scenario can be structured based on the encoder architecture, the fusion strategy, and the optimization technique. The literature has primarily focused on using specific encoder architectures for local regions, lacking a deeper exploration of other components in the MVL methodology. In contrast, we investigate the simultaneous selection of the fusion strategy and encoder architecture, assessing global-scale cropland and crop-type classifications. We use a range of five fusion strategies (Input, Feature, Decision, Ensemble, Hybrid) and five temporal encoders (LSTM, GRU, TempCNN, TAE, L-TAE) as possible configurations in the MVL method. We use the CropHarvest dataset for validation, which provides optical, radar, weather time series, and topographic information as input data. We found that in scenarios with a limited number of labeled samples, a unique configuration is insufficient for all the cases. Instead, a specialized combination should be meticulously sought, including an encoder and fusion strategy. To streamline this search process, we suggest identifying the optimal encoder architecture tailored for a particular fusion strategy, and then determining the most suitable fusion strategy for the classification task. We provide a methodological framework for researchers exploring crop classification through an MVL methodology.

Farmers face several challenges when growing crops like uncertain irrigation, poor soil quality, etc. Especially in India, a major fraction of farmers do not have the knowledge to select appropriate crops and fertilizers. Moreover, crop failure due to disease causes a significant loss to the farmers, as well as the consumers. While there have been recent developments in the automated detection of these diseases using Machine Learning techniques, the utilization of Deep Learning has not been fully explored. Additionally, such models are not easy to use because of the high-quality data used in their training, lack of computational power, and poor generalizability of the models. To this end, we create an open-source easy-to-use web application to address some of these issues which may help improve crop production. In particular, we support crop recommendation, fertilizer recommendation, plant disease prediction, and an interactive news-feed. In addition, we also use interpretability techniques in an attempt to explain the prediction made by our disease detection model.

Accurate and timely detection of plant stress is essential for yield protection, allowing better-targeted intervention strategies. Recent advances in remote sensing and deep learning have shown great potential for rapid non-invasive detection of plant stress in a fully automated and reproducible manner. However, the existing models always face several challenges: 1) computational inefficiency and the misclassifications between the different stresses with similar symptoms; and 2) the poor interpretability of the host-stress interaction. In this work, we propose a novel fast Fourier Convolutional Neural Network (FFDNN) for accurate and explainable detection of two plant stresses with similar symptoms (i.e. Wheat Yellow Rust And Nitrogen Deficiency). Specifically, unlike the existing CNN models, the main components of the proposed model include: 1) a fast Fourier convolutional block, a newly fast Fourier transformation kernel as the basic perception unit, to substitute the traditional convolutional kernel to capture both local and global responses to plant stress in various time-scale and improve computing efficiency with reduced learning parameters in Fourier domain; 2) Capsule Feature Encoder to encapsulate the extracted features into a series of vector features to represent part-to-whole relationship with the hierarchical structure of the host-stress interactions of the specific stress. In addition, in order to alleviate over-fitting, a photochemical vegetation indices-based filter is placed as pre-processing operator to remove the non-photochemical noises from the input Sentinel-2 time series.

This study investigates the relationship between sugarcane yield and cane height derived under different water and nitrogen conditions from pre-harvest Digital Surface Model (DSM) obtained via Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights over a sugarcane test farm. The farm was divided into 62 blocks based on three water levels (low, medium, and high) and three nitrogen levels (low, medium, and high), with repeated treatments. In pixel distribution of DSM for each block, it provided bimodal distribution representing two peaks, ground level (gaps within canopies) and top of the canopies respectively. Using bimodal distribution, mean cane height was extracted for each block by applying a trimmed mean to the pixel distribution, focusing on the top canopy points. Similarly, the extracted mean elevation of the base was derived from the bottom points, representing ground level. The Derived Cane Height Model (DCHM) was generated by taking the difference between the mean canopy height and mean base elevation for each block. Yield measurements (tons/acre) were recorded post-harvest for each block. By aggregating the data into nine treatment zones (e.g., high water-low nitrogen, low water-high nitrogen), the DCHM and median yield were calculated for each zone. The regression analysis between the DCHM and corresponding yields for the different treatment zones yielded an R 2 of 0.95. This study demonstrates the significant impact of water and nitrogen treatments on sugarcane height and yield, utilizing one-time UAV-derived DSM data.

Segmentation of crop fields is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity, monitoring crop health, and promoting sustainable practices. Deep learning models adopted for this task must ensure accurate and reliable predictions to avoid economic losses and environmental impact. The newly proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) offer promising advancements in the performance of neural networks. This paper analyzes the integration of KAN layers into the U-Net architecture (U-KAN) to segment crop fields using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 satellite images and provides an analysis of the performance and explainability of these networks. Our findings indicate a 2\% improvement in IoU compared to the traditional full-convolutional U-Net model in fewer GFLOPs. Furthermore, gradient-based explanation techniques show that U-KAN predictions are highly plausible and that the network has a very high ability to focus on the boundaries of cultivated areas rather than on the areas themselves. The per-channel relevance analysis also reveals that some channels are irrelevant to this task.

Crop biomass, a critical indicator of plant growth, health, and productivity, is invaluable for crop breeding programs and agronomic research. However, the accurate and scalable quantification of crop biomass remains inaccessible due to limitations in existing measurement methods. One of the obstacles impeding the advancement of current crop biomass prediction methodologies is the scarcity of publicly available datasets. Addressing this gap, we introduce a new dataset in this domain, i.e. Multi-modality dataset for crop biomass estimation (MMCBE). Comprising 216 sets of multi-view drone images, coupled with LiDAR point clouds, and hand-labelled ground truth, MMCBE represents the first multi-modality one in the field. This dataset aims to establish benchmark methods for crop biomass quantification and foster the development of vision-based approaches. We have rigorously evaluated state-of-the-art crop biomass estimation methods using MMCBE and ventured into additional potential applications, such as 3D crop reconstruction from drone imagery and novel-view rendering. With this publication, we are making our comprehensive dataset available to the broader community.

Data scarcity in African agriculture hampers machine learning (ML) model performance, limiting innovations in precision agriculture. The Synthetic Agriculture Data for Africa (SAGDA) library, a Python-based open-source toolkit, addresses this gap by generating, augmenting, and validating synthetic agricultural datasets. We present SAGDA's design and development practices, highlighting its core functions: generate, model, augment, validate, visualize, optimize, and simulate, as well as their roles in applications of ML for agriculture. Two use cases are detailed: yield prediction enhanced via data augmentation, and multi-objective NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) fertilizer recommendation. We conclude with future plans for expanding SAGDA's capabilities, underscoring the vital role of open-source, data-driven practices for African agriculture.

This paper introduces WeatherFormer, a transformer encoder-based model designed to learn robust weather features from minimal observations. It addresses the challenge of modeling complex weather dynamics from small datasets, a bottleneck for many prediction tasks in agriculture, epidemiology, and climate science. WeatherFormer was pretrained on a large pretraining dataset comprised of 39 years of satellite measurements across the Americas. With a novel pretraining task and fine-tuning, WeatherFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in county-level soybean yield prediction and influenza forecasting. Technical innovations include a unique spatiotemporal encoding that captures geographical, annual, and seasonal variations, adapting the transformer architecture to continuous weather data, and a pretraining strategy to learn representations that are robust to missing weather features. This paper for the first time demonstrates the effectiveness of pretraining large transformer encoder models for weather-dependent applications across multiple domains.

The number of people living in this agricultural nation of ours, which is surrounded by lush greenery, is growing on a daily basis. As a result of this, the level of arable land is decreasing, as well as residential houses and industrial factories. The food crisis is becoming the main threat for us in the upcoming days. Because on the one hand, the population is increasing, and on the other hand, the amount of food crop production is decreasing due to the attack of diseases. Rice is one of the most significant cultivated crops since it provides food for more than half of the world's population. Bangladesh is dependent on rice (Oryza sativa) as a vital crop for its agriculture, but it faces a significant problem as a result of the ongoing decline in rice yield brought on by common diseases. Early disease detection is the main difficulty in rice crop cultivation. In this paper, we proposed our own dataset, which was collected from the Bangladesh field, and also applied deep learning and transfer learning models for the evaluation of the datasets. We elaborately explain our dataset and also give direction for further research work to serve society using this dataset. We applied a light CNN model and pre-trained InceptionNet-V2, EfficientNet-V2, and MobileNet-V2 models, which achieved 91.5% performance for the EfficientNet-V2 model of this work. The results obtained assaulted other models and even exceeded approaches that are considered to be part of the state of the art. It has been demonstrated by this study that it is possible to precisely and effectively identify diseases that affect rice leaves using this unbiased datasets. After analysis of the performance of different models, the proposed datasets are significant for the society for research work to provide solutions for decreasing rice leaf disease.

Human society needs to increase food production by an estimated 70% by 2050 to feed an expected population size that is predicted to be over 9 billion people. Currently, infectious diseases reduce the potential yield by an average of 40% with many farmers in the developing world experiencing yield losses as high as 100%. The widespread distribution of smartphones among crop growers around the world with an expected 5 billion smartphones by 2020 offers the potential of turning the smartphone into a valuable tool for diverse communities growing food. One potential application is the development of mobile disease diagnostics through machine learning and crowdsourcing. Here we announce the release of over 50,000 expertly curated images on healthy and infected leaves of crops plants through the existing online platform PlantVillage. We describe both the data and the platform. These data are the beginning of an on-going, crowdsourcing effort to enable computer vision approaches to help solve the problem of yield losses in crop plants due to infectious diseases.

African agriculture is undergoing rapid transformation. Annual maps of crop fields are key to understanding the nature of this transformation, but such maps are currently lacking and must be developed using advanced machine learning models trained on high resolution remote sensing imagery. To enable the development of such models, we delineated field boundaries in 33,746 Planet images captured between 2017 and 2023 across the continent using a custom labeling platform with built-in procedures for assessing and mitigating label error. We collected 42,403 labels, including 7,204 labels arising from tasks dedicated to assessing label quality (Class 1 labels), 32,167 from sites mapped once by a single labeller (Class 2) and 3,032 labels from sites where 3 or more labellers were tasked to map the same location (Class 4). Class 1 labels were used to calculate labeller-specific quality scores, while Class 1 and 4 sites mapped by at least 3 labellers were used to further evaluate label uncertainty using a Bayesian risk metric. Quality metrics showed that label quality was moderately high (0.75) for measures of total field extent, but low regarding the number of individual fields delineated (0.33), and the position of field edges (0.05). These values are expected when delineating small-scale fields in 3-5 m resolution imagery, which can be too coarse to reliably distinguish smaller fields, particularly in dense croplands, and therefore requires substantial labeller judgement. Nevertheless, previous work shows that such labels can train effective field mapping models. Furthermore, this large, probabilistic sample on its own provides valuable insight into regional agricultural characteristics, highlighting variations in the median field size and density. The imagery and vectorized labels along with quality information is available for download from two public repositories.

Vegetation indices allow to efficiently monitor vegetation growth and agricultural activities. Previous generations of satellites were capturing a limited number of spectral bands, and a few expert-designed vegetation indices were sufficient to harness their potential. New generations of multi- and hyperspectral satellites can however capture additional bands, but are not yet efficiently exploited. In this work, we propose an explainable-AI-based method to select and design suitable vegetation indices. We first train a deep neural network using multispectral satellite data, then extract feature importance to identify the most influential bands. We subsequently select suitable existing vegetation indices or modify them to incorporate the identified bands and retrain our model. We validate our approach on a crop classification task. Our results indicate that models trained on individual indices achieve comparable results to the baseline model trained on all bands, while the combination of two indices surpasses the baseline in certain cases.

Developing computer vision-based rice phenotyping techniques is crucial for precision field management and accelerating breeding, thereby continuously advancing rice production. Among phenotyping tasks, distinguishing image components is a key prerequisite for characterizing plant growth and development at the organ scale, enabling deeper insights into eco-physiological processes. However, due to the fine structure of rice organs and complex illumination within the canopy, this task remains highly challenging, underscoring the need for a high-quality training dataset. Such datasets are scarce, both due to a lack of large, representative collections of rice field images and the time-intensive nature of annotation. To address this gap, we established the first comprehensive multi-class rice semantic segmentation dataset, RiceSEG. We gathered nearly 50,000 high-resolution, ground-based images from five major rice-growing countries (China, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania), encompassing over 6,000 genotypes across all growth stages. From these original images, 3,078 representative samples were selected and annotated with six classes (background, green vegetation, senescent vegetation, panicle, weeds, and duckweed) to form the RiceSEG dataset. Notably, the sub-dataset from China spans all major genotypes and rice-growing environments from the northeast to the south. Both state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and transformer-based semantic segmentation models were used as baselines. While these models perform reasonably well in segmenting background and green vegetation, they face difficulties during the reproductive stage, when canopy structures are more complex and multiple classes are involved. These findings highlight the importance of our dataset for developing specialized segmentation models for rice and other crops.

Accurate crop mapping fundamentally relies on modeling multi-scale spatiotemporal patterns, where spatial scales range from individual field textures to landscape-level context, and temporal scales capture both short-term phenological transitions and full growing-season dynamics. Transformer-based remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) offer promising potential for crop mapping due to their innate ability for unified spatiotemporal processing. However, current RSFMs remain suboptimal for crop mapping: they either employ fixed spatiotemporal windows that ignore the multi-scale nature of crop systems or completely disregard temporal information by focusing solely on spatial patterns. To bridge these gaps, we present AgriFM, a multi-source remote sensing foundation model specifically designed for agricultural crop mapping. Our approach begins by establishing the necessity of simultaneous hierarchical spatiotemporal feature extraction, leading to the development of a modified Video Swin Transformer architecture where temporal down-sampling is synchronized with spatial scaling operations. This modified backbone enables efficient unified processing of long time-series satellite inputs. AgriFM leverages temporally rich data streams from three satellite sources including MODIS, Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2, and is pre-trained on a global representative dataset comprising over 25 million image samples supervised by land cover products. The resulting framework incorporates a versatile decoder architecture that dynamically fuses these learned spatiotemporal representations, supporting diverse downstream tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate AgriFM's superior performance over conventional deep learning approaches and state-of-the-art general-purpose RSFMs across all downstream tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/flyakon/AgriFM.

With climate change-related extreme events on the rise, high dimensional Earth observation data presents a unique opportunity for forecasting and understanding impacts on ecosystems. This is, however, impeded by the complexity of processing, visualizing, modeling, and explaining this data. To showcase how this challenge can be met, here we train a convolutional long short-term memory-based architecture on the novel DeepExtremeCubes dataset. DeepExtremeCubes includes around 40,000 long-term Sentinel-2 minicubes (January 2016-October 2022) worldwide, along with labeled extreme events, meteorological data, vegetation land cover, and topography map, sampled from locations affected by extreme climate events and surrounding areas. When predicting future reflectances and vegetation impacts through kernel normalized difference vegetation index, the model achieved an R^2 score of 0.9055 in the test set. Explainable artificial intelligence was used to analyze the model's predictions during the October 2020 Central South America compound heatwave and drought event. We chose the same area exactly one year before the event as counterfactual, finding that the average temperature and surface pressure are generally the best predictors under normal conditions. In contrast, minimum anomalies of evaporation and surface latent heat flux take the lead during the event. A change of regime is also observed in the attributions before the event, which might help assess how long the event was brewing before happening. The code to replicate all experiments and figures in this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/DeepExtremes/txyXAI

The need for higher agricultural productivity has demanded the intensive use of pesticides. However, their correct use depends on assessment methods that can accurately predict how well the pesticides' spraying covered the intended crop region. Some methods have been proposed in the literature, but their high cost and low portability harm their widespread use. This paper proposes and experimentally evaluates a new methodology based on the use of a smartphone-based mobile application, named DropLeaf. Experiments performed using DropLeaf showed that, in addition to its versatility, it can predict with high accuracy the pesticide spraying. DropLeaf is a five-fold image-processing methodology based on: (i) color space conversion, (ii) threshold noise removal, (iii) convolutional operations of dilation and erosion, (iv) detection of contour markers in the water-sensitive card, and, (v) identification of droplets via the marker-controlled watershed transformation. The authors performed successful experiments over two case studies, the first using a set of synthetic cards and the second using a real-world crop. The proposed tool can be broadly used by farmers equipped with conventional mobile phones, improving the use of pesticides with health, environmental and financial benefits.

Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, directly influencing crop yields and global food security. However, challenges such as interdisciplinary complexity and high costs with limited returns hinder progress, leading to a shortage of experts and insufficient technological support. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise across various fields, their application in seed science remains limited due to the scarcity of digital resources, complex gene-trait relationships, and the lack of standardized benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce SeedBench -- the first multi-task benchmark specifically designed for seed science. Developed in collaboration with domain experts, SeedBench focuses on seed breeding and simulates key aspects of modern breeding processes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 26 leading LLMs, encompassing proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific fine-tuned models. Our findings not only highlight the substantial gaps between the power of LLMs and the real-world seed science problems, but also make a foundational step for research on LLMs for seed design.

Crop detection is integral for precision agriculture applications such as automated yield estimation or fruit picking. However, crop detection, e.g., apple detection in orchard environments remains challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets and the small relative size of the crops in the image. In this work, we address these challenges by reformulating the apple detection task in a semi-supervised manner. To this end, we provide the large, high-resolution dataset MAD comprising 105 labeled images with 14,667 annotated apple instances and 4,440 unlabeled images. Utilizing this dataset, we also propose a novel Semi-Supervised Small Apple Detection system S^3AD based on contextual attention and selective tiling to improve the challenging detection of small apples, while limiting the computational overhead. We conduct an extensive evaluation on MAD and the MSU dataset, showing that S^3AD substantially outperforms strong fully-supervised baselines, including several small object detection systems, by up to 14.9%. Additionally, we exploit the detailed annotations of our dataset w.r.t. apple properties to analyze the influence of relative size or level of occlusion on the results of various systems, quantifying current challenges.

This research utilized three types of artificial neural network (ANN) methodologies, namely Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN) with varied training, transfer, divide, and learning functions; Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN); and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), to forecast the severity of stem rust. It considered parameters such as mean maximum temperature, mean minimum temperature, mean rainfall, mean average temperature, mean relative humidity, and different wheat varieties. The statistical analysis revealed that GRNN demonstrated effective predictive capability and required less training time compared to the other models. Additionally, the results indicated that total seasonal rainfall positively influenced the development of wheat stem rust. Keywords: Wheat stem rust, Back propagation neural network, Radial Basis Function Neural Network, General Regression Neural Network.

Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) techniques have recently experienced significant growth and have been extensively employed to adapt large vision and language models to various domains, enabling satisfactory model performance with minimal computational needs. Despite these advances, more research has yet to delve into potential PEFT applications in real-life scenarios, particularly in the critical domains of remote sensing and crop monitoring. The diversity of climates across different regions and the need for comprehensive large-scale datasets have posed significant obstacles to accurately identify crop types across varying geographic locations and changing growing seasons. This study seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively exploring the feasibility of cross-area and cross-year out-of-distribution generalization using the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) wheat crop monitoring model. The aim of this work is to explore PEFT approaches for crop monitoring. Specifically, we focus on adapting the SOTA TSViT model to address winter wheat field segmentation, a critical task for crop monitoring and food security. This adaptation process involves integrating different PEFT techniques, including BigFit, LoRA, Adaptformer, and prompt tuning. Using PEFT techniques, we achieved notable results comparable to those achieved using full fine-tuning methods while training only a mere 0.7% parameters of the whole TSViT architecture. The in-house labeled data-set, referred to as the Beqaa-Lebanon dataset, comprises high-quality annotated polygons for wheat and non-wheat classes with a total surface of 170 kmsq, over five consecutive years. Using Sentinel-2 images, our model achieved a 84% F1-score. We intend to publicly release the Lebanese winter wheat data set, code repository, and model weights.

Weather forecasting is critical for a range of human activities including transportation, agriculture, industry, as well as the safety of the general public. Machine learning models have the potential to transform the complex weather prediction pipeline, but current approaches still rely on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems, limiting forecast speed and accuracy. Here we demonstrate that a machine learning model can replace the entire operational NWP pipeline. Aardvark Weather, an end-to-end data-driven weather prediction system, ingests raw observations and outputs global gridded forecasts and local station forecasts. Further, it can be optimised end-to-end to maximise performance over quantities of interest. Global forecasts outperform an operational NWP baseline for multiple variables and lead times. Local station forecasts are skillful up to ten days lead time and achieve comparable and often lower errors than a post-processed global NWP baseline and a state-of-the-art end-to-end forecasting system with input from human forecasters. These forecasts are produced with a remarkably simple neural process model using just 8% of the input data and three orders of magnitude less compute than existing NWP and hybrid AI-NWP methods. We anticipate that Aardvark Weather will be the starting point for a new generation of end-to-end machine learning models for medium-range forecasting that will reduce computational costs by orders of magnitude and enable the rapid and cheap creation of bespoke models for users in a variety of fields, including for the developing world where state-of-the-art local models are not currently available.

We introduce EarthPT -- an Earth Observation (EO) pretrained transformer. EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. We demonstrate that EarthPT is an effective forecaster that can accurately predict future pixel-level surface reflectances across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future. For example, forecasts of the evolution of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) have a typical error of approximately 0.05 (over a natural range of -1 -> 1) at the pixel level over a five month test set horizon, out-performing simple phase-folded models based on historical averaging. We also demonstrate that embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification. Excitingly, we note that the abundance of EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar `Large Observation Models.'

Weed management represents a critical challenge in agriculture, significantly impacting crop yields and requiring substantial resources for control. Effective weed monitoring and analysis strategies are crucial for implementing sustainable agricultural practices and site-specific management approaches. We introduce WeedSense, a novel multi-task learning architecture for comprehensive weed analysis that jointly performs semantic segmentation, height estimation, and growth stage classification. We present a unique dataset capturing 16 weed species over an 11-week growth cycle with pixel-level annotations, height measurements, and temporal labels. WeedSense leverages a dual-path encoder incorporating Universal Inverted Bottleneck blocks and a Multi-Task Bifurcated Decoder with transformer-based feature fusion to generate multi-scale features and enable simultaneous prediction across multiple tasks. WeedSense outperforms other state-of-the-art models on our comprehensive evaluation. On our multi-task dataset, WeedSense achieves mIoU of 89.78% for segmentation, 1.67cm MAE for height estimation, and 99.99% accuracy for growth stage classification while maintaining real-time inference at 160 FPS. Our multitask approach achieves 3times faster inference than sequential single-task execution and uses 32.4% fewer parameters. Please see our project page at weedsense.github.io.

India loses 35% of the annual crop yield due to plant diseases. Early detection of plant diseases remains difficult due to the lack of lab infrastructure and expertise. In this paper, we explore the possibility of computer vision approaches for scalable and early plant disease detection. The lack of availability of sufficiently large-scale non-lab data set remains a major challenge for enabling vision based plant disease detection. Against this background, we present PlantDoc: a dataset for visual plant disease detection. Our dataset contains 2,598 data points in total across 13 plant species and up to 17 classes of diseases, involving approximately 300 human hours of effort in annotating internet scraped images. To show the efficacy of our dataset, we learn 3 models for the task of plant disease classification. Our results show that modelling using our dataset can increase the classification accuracy by up to 31%. We believe that our dataset can help reduce the entry barrier of computer vision techniques in plant disease detection.

Wheat varieties show a large diversity of traits and phenotypes. Linking them to genetic variability is essential for shorter and more efficient wheat breeding programs. Newly desirable wheat variety traits include disease resistance to reduce pesticide use, adaptation to climate change, resistance to heat and drought stresses, or low gluten content of grains. Wheat breeding experiments are documented by a large body of scientific literature and observational data obtained in-field and under controlled conditions. The cross-referencing of complementary information from the literature and observational data is essential to the study of the genotype-phenotype relationship and to the improvement of wheat selection. The scientific literature on genetic marker-assisted selection describes much information about the genotype-phenotype relationship. However, the variety of expressions used to refer to traits and phenotype values in scientific articles is a hinder to finding information and cross-referencing it. When trained adequately by annotated examples, recent text mining methods perform highly in named entity recognition and linking in the scientific domain. While several corpora contain annotations of human and animal phenotypes, currently, no corpus is available for training and evaluating named entity recognition and entity-linking methods in plant phenotype literature. The Triticum aestivum trait Corpus is a new gold standard for traits and phenotypes of wheat. It consists of 540 PubMed references fully annotated for trait, phenotype, and species named entities using the Wheat Trait and Phenotype Ontology and the species taxonomy of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A study of the performance of tools trained on the Triticum aestivum trait Corpus shows that the corpus is suitable for the training and evaluation of named entity recognition and linking.

Advances in deep learning and transfer learning have paved the way for various automation classification tasks in agriculture, including plant diseases, pests, weeds, and plant species detection. However, agriculture automation still faces various challenges, such as the limited size of datasets and the absence of plant-domain-specific pretrained models. Domain specific pretrained models have shown state of art performance in various computer vision tasks including face recognition and medical imaging diagnosis. In this paper, we propose AgriNet dataset, a collection of 160k agricultural images from more than 19 geographical locations, several images captioning devices, and more than 423 classes of plant species and diseases. We also introduce AgriNet models, a set of pretrained models on five ImageNet architectures: VGG16, VGG19, Inception-v3, InceptionResNet-v2, and Xception. AgriNet-VGG19 achieved the highest classification accuracy of 94 % and the highest F1-score of 92%. Additionally, all proposed models were found to accurately classify the 423 classes of plant species, diseases, pests, and weeds with a minimum accuracy of 87% for the Inception-v3 model.Finally, experiments to evaluate of superiority of AgriNet models compared to ImageNet models were conducted on two external datasets: pest and plant diseases dataset from Bangladesh and a plant diseases dataset from Kashmir.

Drones have revolutionized various domains, including agriculture. Recent advances in deep learning have propelled among other things object detection in computer vision. This study utilized YOLO, a real-time object detector, to identify and count coconut palm trees in Ghanaian farm drone footage. The farm presented has lost track of its trees due to different planting phases. While manual counting would be very tedious and error-prone, accurately determining the number of trees is crucial for efficient planning and management of agricultural processes, especially for optimizing yields and predicting production. We assessed YOLO for palm detection within a semi-automated framework, evaluated accuracy augmentations, and pondered its potential for farmers. Data was captured in September 2022 via drones. To optimize YOLO with scarce data, synthetic images were created for model training and validation. The YOLOv7 model, pretrained on the COCO dataset (excluding coconut palms), was adapted using tailored data. Trees from footage were repositioned on synthetic images, with testing on distinct authentic images. In our experiments, we adjusted hyperparameters, improving YOLO's mean average precision (mAP). We also tested various altitudes to determine the best drone height. From an initial [email protected] of 0.65, we achieved 0.88, highlighting the value of synthetic images in agricultural scenarios.

There are two common ways in which developers are incorporating proprietary and domain-specific data when building applications of Large Language Models (LLMs): Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Fine-Tuning. RAG augments the prompt with the external data, while fine-Tuning incorporates the additional knowledge into the model itself. However, the pros and cons of both approaches are not well understood. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for fine-tuning and RAG, and present the tradeoffs of both for multiple popular LLMs, including Llama2-13B, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our pipeline consists of multiple stages, including extracting information from PDFs, generating questions and answers, using them for fine-tuning, and leveraging GPT-4 for evaluating the results. We propose metrics to assess the performance of different stages of the RAG and fine-Tuning pipeline. We conduct an in-depth study on an agricultural dataset. Agriculture as an industry has not seen much penetration of AI, and we study a potentially disruptive application - what if we could provide location-specific insights to a farmer? Our results show the effectiveness of our dataset generation pipeline in capturing geographic-specific knowledge, and the quantitative and qualitative benefits of RAG and fine-tuning. We see an accuracy increase of over 6 p.p. when fine-tuning the model and this is cumulative with RAG, which increases accuracy by 5 p.p. further. In one particular experiment, we also demonstrate that the fine-tuned model leverages information from across geographies to answer specific questions, increasing answer similarity from 47% to 72%. Overall, the results point to how systems built using LLMs can be adapted to respond and incorporate knowledge across a dimension that is critical for a specific industry, paving the way for further applications of LLMs in other industrial domains.

As the global food security landscape continues to evolve, the need for accurate and reliable crop disease diagnosis has never been more pressing. To address global food security concerns, we extend the widely used PlantVillage dataset with additional apple leaf disease classes, enhancing diversity and complexity. Experimental evaluations on both original and extended datasets reveal that existing models struggle with the new additions, highlighting the need for more robust and generalizable computer vision models. Test F1 scores of 99.63% and 97.87% were obtained on the original and extended datasets, respectively. Our study provides a more challenging and diverse benchmark, paving the way for the development of accurate and reliable models for identifying apple leaf diseases under varying imaging conditions. The expanded dataset is available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/akinyemijoseph/apple-leaf-disease-dataset-6-classes-v2 enabling future research to build upon our findings.

In this work we introduce Sen4AgriNet, a Sentinel-2 based time series multi country benchmark dataset, tailored for agricultural monitoring applications with Machine and Deep Learning. Sen4AgriNet dataset is annotated from farmer declarations collected via the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) for harmonizing country wide labels. These declarations have only recently been made available as open data, allowing for the first time the labeling of satellite imagery from ground truth data. We proceed to propose and standardise a new crop type taxonomy across Europe that address Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) needs, based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Indicative Crop Classification scheme. Sen4AgriNet is the only multi-country, multi-year dataset that includes all spectral information. It is constructed to cover the period 2016-2020 for Catalonia and France, while it can be extended to include additional countries. Currently, it contains 42.5 million parcels, which makes it significantly larger than other available archives. We extract two sub-datasets to highlight its value for diverse Deep Learning applications; the Object Aggregated Dataset (OAD) and the Patches Assembled Dataset (PAD). OAD capitalizes zonal statistics of each parcel, thus creating a powerful label-to-features instance for classification algorithms. On the other hand, PAD structure generalizes the classification problem to parcel extraction and semantic segmentation and labeling. The PAD and OAD are examined under three different scenarios to showcase and model the effects of spatial and temporal variability across different years and different countries.

Predictive model design for accurately predicting future stock prices has always been considered an interesting and challenging research problem. The task becomes complex due to the volatile and stochastic nature of the stock prices in the real world which is affected by numerous controllable and uncontrollable variables. This paper presents an optimized predictive model built on long-and-short-term memory (LSTM) architecture for automatically extracting past stock prices from the web over a specified time interval and predicting their future prices for a specified forecast horizon, and forecasts the future stock prices. The model is deployed for making buy and sell transactions based on its predicted results for 70 important stocks from seven different sectors listed in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. The profitability of each sector is derived based on the total profit yielded by the stocks in that sector over a period from Jan 1, 2010 to Aug 26, 2021. The sectors are compared based on their profitability values. The prediction accuracy of the model is also evaluated for each sector. The results indicate that the model is highly accurate in predicting future stock prices.

One of the critical biotic stress factors paddy farmers face is diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. These diseases affect plants' health severely and lead to significant crop loss. Most of these diseases can be identified by regularly observing the leaves and stems under expert supervision. In a country with vast agricultural regions and limited crop protection experts, manual identification of paddy diseases is challenging. Thus, to add a solution to this problem, it is necessary to automate the disease identification process and provide easily accessible decision support tools to enable effective crop protection measures. However, the lack of availability of public datasets with detailed disease information limits the practical implementation of accurate disease detection systems. This paper presents Paddy Doctor, a visual image dataset for identifying paddy diseases. Our dataset contains 16,225 annotated paddy leaf images across 13 classes (12 diseases and normal leaf). We benchmarked the Paddy Doctor dataset using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and four transfer learning based models (VGG16, MobileNet, Xception, and ResNet34). The experimental results showed that ResNet34 achieved the highest F1-score of 97.50%. We release our dataset and reproducible code in the open source for community use.

Quality assessment of agricultural produce is a crucial step in minimizing food stock wastage. However, this is currently done manually and often requires expert supervision, especially in smaller seeds like corn. We propose a novel computer vision-based system for automating this process. We build a novel seed image acquisition setup, which captures both the top and bottom views. Dataset collection for this problem has challenges of data annotation costs/time and class imbalance. We address these challenges by i.) using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) to generate real-looking images for the classes with lesser images and ii.) annotate a large dataset with minimal expert human intervention by using a Batch Active Learning (BAL) based annotation tool. We benchmark different image classification models on the dataset obtained. We are able to get accuracies of up to 91.6% for testing the physical purity of seed samples.

With a rapidly increasing amount and diversity of remote sensing (RS) data sources, there is a strong need for multi-view learning modeling. This is a complex task when considering the differences in resolution, magnitude, and noise of RS data. The typical approach for merging multiple RS sources has been input-level fusion, but other - more advanced - fusion strategies may outperform this traditional approach. This work assesses different fusion strategies for crop classification in the CropHarvest dataset. The fusion methods proposed in this work outperform models based on individual views and previous fusion methods. We do not find one single fusion method that consistently outperforms all other approaches. Instead, we present a comparison of multi-view fusion methods for three different datasets and show that, depending on the test region, different methods obtain the best performance. Despite this, we suggest a preliminary criterion for the selection of fusion methods.

Since the launch of the Sentinel-2 (S2) satellites, many ML models have used the data for diverse applications. The scene classification layer (SCL) inside the S2 product provides rich information for training, such as filtering images with high cloud coverage. However, there is more potential in this. We propose a technique to assess the clean optical coverage of a region, expressed by a SITS and calculated with the S2-based SCL data. With a manual threshold and specific labels in the SCL, the proposed technique assigns a percentage of spatial and temporal coverage across the time series and a high/low assessment. By evaluating the AI4EO challenge for Enhanced Agriculture, we show that the assessment is correlated to the predictive results of ML models. The classification results in a region with low spatial and temporal coverage is worse than in a region with high coverage. Finally, we applied the technique across all continents of the global dataset LandCoverNet.

Plant traits such as leaf carbon content and leaf mass are essential variables in the study of biodiversity and climate change. However, conventional field sampling cannot feasibly cover trait variation at ecologically meaningful spatial scales. Machine learning represents a valuable solution for plant trait prediction across ecosystems, leveraging hyperspectral data from remote sensing. Nevertheless, trait prediction from hyperspectral data is challenged by label scarcity and substantial domain shifts (\eg across sensors, ecological distributions), requiring robust cross-domain methods. Here, we present GreenHyperSpectra, a pretraining dataset encompassing real-world cross-sensor and cross-ecosystem samples designed to benchmark trait prediction with semi- and self-supervised methods. We adopt an evaluation framework encompassing in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. We successfully leverage GreenHyperSpectra to pretrain label-efficient multi-output regression models that outperform the state-of-the-art supervised baseline. Our empirical analyses demonstrate substantial improvements in learning spectral representations for trait prediction, establishing a comprehensive methodological framework to catalyze research at the intersection of representation learning and plant functional traits assessment. All code and data are available at: https://github.com/echerif18/HyspectraSSL.

Accurate identification of crop and weed species is critical for precision agriculture and sustainable farming. However, it remains a challenging task due to a variety of factors -- a high degree of visual similarity among species, environmental variability, and a continued lack of large, agriculture-specific image data. We introduce iNatAg, a large-scale image dataset which contains over 4.7 million images of 2,959 distinct crop and weed species, with precise annotations along the taxonomic hierarchy from binary crop/weed labels to specific species labels. Curated from the broader iNaturalist database, iNatAg contains data from every continent and accurately reflects the variability of natural image captures and environments. Enabled by this data, we train benchmark models built upon the Swin Transformer architecture and evaluate the impact of various modifications such as the incorporation of geospatial data and LoRA finetuning. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art performance across all taxonomic classification tasks, achieving 92.38\% on crop and weed classification. Furthermore, the scale of our dataset enables us to explore incorrect misclassifications and unlock new analytic possiblities for plant species. By combining large-scale species coverage, multi-task labels, and geographic diversity, iNatAg provides a new foundation for building robust, geolocation-aware agricultural classification systems. We release the iNatAg dataset publicly through AgML (https://github.com/Project-AgML/AgML), enabling direct access and integration into agricultural machine learning workflows.

From crop mapping to flood detection, machine learning in remote sensing has a wide range of societally beneficial applications. The commonalities between remote sensing data in these applications present an opportunity for pretrained machine learning models tailored to remote sensing to reduce the labeled data and effort required to solve individual tasks. However, such models must be: (i) flexible enough to ingest input data of varying sensor modalities and shapes (i.e., of varying spatial and temporal dimensions), and (ii) able to model Earth surface phenomena of varying scales and types. To solve this gap, we present Galileo, a family of pretrained remote sensing models designed to flexibly process multimodal remote sensing data. We also introduce a novel and highly effective self-supervised learning approach to learn both large- and small-scale features, a challenge not addressed by previous models. Our Galileo models obtain state-of-the-art results across diverse remote sensing tasks.

Aphid infestations are one of the primary causes of extensive damage to wheat and sorghum fields and are one of the most common vectors for plant viruses, resulting in significant agricultural yield losses. To address this problem, farmers often employ the inefficient use of harmful chemical pesticides that have negative health and environmental impacts. As a result, a large amount of pesticide is wasted on areas without significant pest infestation. This brings to attention the urgent need for an intelligent autonomous system that can locate and spray sufficiently large infestations selectively within the complex crop canopies. We have developed a large multi-scale dataset for aphid cluster detection and segmentation, collected from actual sorghum fields and meticulously annotated to include clusters of aphids. Our dataset comprises a total of 54,742 image patches, showcasing a variety of viewpoints, diverse lighting conditions, and multiple scales, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world applications. In this study, we trained and evaluated four real-time semantic segmentation models and three object detection models specifically for aphid cluster segmentation and detection. Considering the balance between accuracy and efficiency, Fast-SCNN delivered the most effective segmentation results, achieving 80.46% mean precision, 81.21% mean recall, and 91.66 frames per second (FPS). For object detection, RT-DETR exhibited the best overall performance with a 61.63% mean average precision (mAP), 92.6% mean recall, and 72.55 on an NVIDIA V100 GPU. Our experiments further indicate that aphid cluster segmentation is more suitable for assessing aphid infestations than using detection models.

Pyrolysis techniques have served to be a groundbreaking technique for effectively utilising natural and man-made biomass products like plastics, wood, crop residue, fruit peels etc. Recent advancements have shown a greater yield of essential products like biochar, bio-oil and other non-condensable gases by blending different biomasses in a certain ratio. This synergy effect of combining two pyrolytic raw materials i.e co-pyrolysis of algae and wood biomass has been systematically studied and grouped into 3 phases in this research paper-kinetic analysis of co-pyrolysis, correlation among proximate and ultimate analysis with bio-char yield and lastly grouping of different weight ratios based on biochar yield up to a certain percentage. Different ML and DL algorithms have been utilized for regression and classification techniques to give a comprehensive overview of the effect of the synergy of two different biomass materials on biochar yield. For the first phase, the best prediction of biochar yield was obtained by using a decision tree regressor with a perfect MSE score of 0.00, followed by a gradient-boosting regressor. The second phase was analyzed using both ML and DL techniques. Within ML, SVR proved to be the most convenient model with an accuracy score of 0.972 with DNN employed for deep learning technique. Finally, for the third phase, binary classification was applied to biochar yield with and without heating rate for biochar yield percentage above and below 40%. The best technique for ML was Support Vector followed by Random forest while ANN was the most suitable Deep Learning Technique.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) for numerical weather prediction (NWP) have significantly transformed atmospheric modeling. AI NWP models outperform traditional physics-based systems, such as the Integrated Forecast System (IFS), across several global metrics while requiring fewer computational resources. However, existing AI NWP models face limitations related to training datasets and timestep choices, often resulting in artifacts that reduce model performance. To address these challenges, we introduce the Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT) framework, developed at NSF NCAR. CREDIT provides a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly platform for training and deploying AI-based atmospheric models on high-performance computing systems. It offers an end-to-end pipeline for data preprocessing, model training, and evaluation, democratizing access to advanced AI NWP capabilities. We demonstrate CREDIT's potential through WXFormer, a novel deterministic vision transformer designed to predict atmospheric states autoregressively, addressing common AI NWP issues like compounding error growth with techniques such as spectral normalization, padding, and multi-step training. Additionally, to illustrate CREDIT's flexibility and state-of-the-art model comparisons, we train the FUXI architecture within this framework. Our findings show that both FUXI and WXFormer, trained on six-hourly ERA5 hybrid sigma-pressure levels, generally outperform IFS HRES in 10-day forecasts, offering potential improvements in efficiency and forecast accuracy. CREDIT's modular design enables researchers to explore various models, datasets, and training configurations, fostering innovation within the scientific community.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has demonstrated capabilities across various domains, but comprehensive benchmarks for agricultural remote sensing (RS) remain scarce. Existing benchmarks designed for agricultural RS scenarios exhibit notable limitations, primarily in terms of insufficient scene diversity in the dataset and oversimplified task design. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgroMind, a comprehensive agricultural remote sensing benchmark covering four task dimensions: spatial perception, object understanding, scene understanding, and scene reasoning, with a total of 13 task types, ranging from crop identification and health monitoring to environmental analysis. We curate a high-quality evaluation set by integrating eight public datasets and one private farmland plot dataset, containing 25,026 QA pairs and 15,556 images. The pipeline begins with multi-source data preprocessing, including collection, format standardization, and annotation refinement. We then generate a diverse set of agriculturally relevant questions through the systematic definition of tasks. Finally, we employ LMMs for inference, generating responses, and performing detailed examinations. We evaluated 18 open-source LMMs and 3 closed-source models on AgroMind. Experiments reveal significant performance gaps, particularly in spatial reasoning and fine-grained recognition, it is notable that human performance lags behind several leading LMMs. By establishing a standardized evaluation framework for agricultural RS, AgroMind reveals the limitations of LMMs in domain knowledge and highlights critical challenges for future work. Data and code can be accessed at https://rssysu.github.io/AgroMind/.

We introduce EuroCropsML, an analysis-ready remote sensing machine learning dataset for time series crop type classification of agricultural parcels in Europe. It is the first dataset designed to benchmark transnational few-shot crop type classification algorithms that supports advancements in algorithmic development and research comparability. It comprises 706 683 multi-class labeled data points across 176 classes, featuring annual time series of per-parcel median pixel values from Sentinel-2 L1C data for 2021, along with crop type labels and spatial coordinates. Based on the open-source EuroCrops collection, EuroCropsML is publicly available on Zenodo.

Progress in large language models is constrained by an evaluation bottleneck: build a benchmark, evaluate models and settings, then iterate. We therefore ask a simple question: can we forecast outcomes before running any experiments? We study text-only performance forecasting: estimating a model's score from a redacted task description and intended configuration, with no access to dataset instances. To support systematic study, we curate PRECOG, a corpus of redacted description-performance pairs spanning diverse tasks, domains, and metrics. Experiments show the task is challenging but feasible: models equipped with a retrieval module that excludes source papers achieve moderate prediction performance with well-calibrated uncertainty, reaching mean absolute error as low as 8.7 on the Accuracy subset at high-confidence thresholds. Our analysis indicates that stronger reasoning models engage in diverse, iterative querying, whereas current open-source models lag and often skip retrieval or gather evidence with limited diversity. We further test a zero-leakage setting, forecasting on newly released datasets or experiments before their papers are indexed, where GPT-5 with built-in web search still attains nontrivial prediction accuracy. Overall, our corpus and analyses offer an initial step toward open-ended anticipatory evaluation, supporting difficulty estimation and smarter experiment prioritization.

The level of ripeness is essential in determining the quality of bananas. To correctly estimate banana maturity, the metrics of international marketing standards need to be considered. However, the process of assessing the maturity of bananas at an industrial level is still carried out using manual methods. The use of CNN models is an attractive tool to solve the problem, but there is a limitation regarding the availability of sufficient data to train these models reliably. On the other hand, in the state-of-the-art, existing CNN models and the available data have reported that the accuracy results are acceptable in identifying banana maturity. For this reason, this work presents the generation of a robust dataset that combines real and synthetic data for different levels of banana ripeness. In addition, it proposes a simple CNN architecture, which is trained with synthetic data and using the transfer learning technique, the model is improved to classify real data, managing to determine the level of maturity of the banana. The proposed CNN model is evaluated with several architectures, then hyper-parameter configurations are varied, and optimizers are used. The results show that the proposed CNN model reaches a high accuracy of 0.917 and a fast execution time.

Accurate forecasts for day-ahead photovoltaic (PV) power generation are crucial to support a high PV penetration rate in the local electricity grid and to assure stability in the grid. We use state-of-the-art tree-based machine learning methods to produce such forecasts and, unlike previous studies, we hereby account for (i) the effects various meteorological as well as astronomical features have on PV power production, and this (ii) at coarse as well as granular spatial locations. To this end, we use data from Belgium and forecast day-ahead PV power production at an hourly resolution. The insights from our study can assist utilities, decision-makers, and other stakeholders in optimizing grid operations, economic dispatch, and in facilitating the integration of distributed PV power into the electricity grid.

International trade policies have recently garnered attention for limiting cross-border exchange of essential goods (e.g. steel, aluminum, soybeans, and beef). Since trade critically affects employment and wages, predicting future patterns of trade is a high-priority for policy makers around the world. While traditional economic models aim to be reliable predictors, we consider the possibility that Machine Learning (ML) techniques allow for better predictions to inform policy decisions. Open-government data provide the fuel to power the algorithms that can explain and forecast trade flows to inform policies. Data collected in this article describe international trade transactions and commonly associated economic factors. Machine learning (ML) models deployed include: ARIMA, GBoosting, XGBoosting, and LightGBM for predicting future trade patterns, and K-Means clustering of countries according to economic factors. Unlike short-term and subjective (straight-line) projections and medium-term (aggre-gated) projections, ML methods provide a range of data-driven and interpretable projections for individual commodities. Models, their results, and policies are introduced and evaluated for prediction quality.

Machine learning for time-series forecasting remains a key area of research. Despite successful application of many machine learning techniques, relating computational efficiency to forecast error remains an under-explored domain. This paper addresses this topic through a series of real-time experiments to quantify the relationship between computational cost and forecast error using meteorological nowcasting as an example use-case. We employ a variety of popular regression techniques (XGBoost, FC-MLP, Transformer, and LSTM) for multi-horizon, short-term forecasting of three variables (temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover) for multiple locations. During a 5-day live experiment, 4000 data sources were streamed for training and inferencing 144 models per hour. These models were parameterized to explore forecast error for two computational cost minimization methods: a novel auto-adaptive data reduction technique (Variance Horizon) and a performance-based concept drift-detection mechanism. Forecast error of all model variations were benchmarked in real-time against a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Performance was assessed using classical and novel evaluation metrics. Results indicate that using the Variance Horizon reduced computational usage by more than 50\%, while increasing between 0-15\% in error. Meanwhile, performance-based retraining reduced computational usage by up to 90\% while also improving forecast error by up to 10\%. Finally, the combination of both the Variance Horizon and performance-based retraining outperformed other model configurations by up to 99.7\% when considering error normalized to computational usage.

We develop a method to generate predictive regions that cover a multivariate response variable with a user-specified probability. Our work is composed of two components. First, we use a deep generative model to learn a representation of the response that has a unimodal distribution. Existing multiple-output quantile regression approaches are effective in such cases, so we apply them on the learned representation, and then transform the solution to the original space of the response. This process results in a flexible and informative region that can have an arbitrary shape, a property that existing methods lack. Second, we propose an extension of conformal prediction to the multivariate response setting that modifies any method to return sets with a pre-specified coverage level. The desired coverage is theoretically guaranteed in the finite-sample case for any distribution. Experiments conducted on both real and synthetic data show that our method constructs regions that are significantly smaller compared to existing techniques.

Unprecedented access to multi-temporal satellite imagery has opened new perspectives for a variety of Earth observation tasks. Among them, pixel-precise panoptic segmentation of agricultural parcels has major economic and environmental implications. While researchers have explored this problem for single images, we argue that the complex temporal patterns of crop phenology are better addressed with temporal sequences of images. In this paper, we present the first end-to-end, single-stage method for panoptic segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series (SITS). This module can be combined with our novel image sequence encoding network which relies on temporal self-attention to extract rich and adaptive multi-scale spatio-temporal features. We also introduce PASTIS, the first open-access SITS dataset with panoptic annotations. We demonstrate the superiority of our encoder for semantic segmentation against multiple competing architectures, and set up the first state-of-the-art of panoptic segmentation of SITS. Our implementation and PASTIS are publicly available.

A data-driven model (DDM) suitable for regional weather forecasting applications is presented. The model extends the Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System by introducing a stretched-grid architecture that dedicates higher resolution over a regional area of interest and maintains a lower resolution elsewhere on the globe. The model is based on graph neural networks, which naturally affords arbitrary multi-resolution grid configurations. The model is applied to short-range weather prediction for the Nordics, producing forecasts at 2.5 km spatial and 6 h temporal resolution. The model is pre-trained on 43 years of global ERA5 data at 31 km resolution and is further refined using 3.3 years of 2.5 km resolution operational analyses from the MetCoOp Ensemble Prediction System (MEPS). The performance of the model is evaluated using surface observations from measurement stations across Norway and is compared to short-range weather forecasts from MEPS. The DDM outperforms both the control run and the ensemble mean of MEPS for 2 m temperature. The model also produces competitive precipitation and wind speed forecasts, but is shown to underestimate extreme events.

UAVs emerge as the optimal carriers for visual weed iden?tification and integrated pest and disease management in crops. How?ever, the absence of specialized datasets impedes the advancement of model development in this domain. To address this, we have developed the Pests and Diseases Tree dataset (PDT dataset). PDT dataset repre?sents the first high-precision UAV-based dataset for targeted detection of tree pests and diseases, which is collected in real-world operational environments and aims to fill the gap in available datasets for this field. Moreover, by aggregating public datasets and network data, we further introduced the Common Weed and Crop dataset (CWC dataset) to ad?dress the challenge of inadequate classification capabilities of test models within datasets for this field. Finally, we propose the YOLO-Dense Pest (YOLO-DP) model for high-precision object detection of weed, pest, and disease crop images. We re-evaluate the state-of-the-art detection models with our proposed PDT dataset and CWC dataset, showing the completeness of the dataset and the effectiveness of the YOLO-DP. The proposed PDT dataset, CWC dataset, and YOLO-DP model are pre?sented at https://github.com/RuiXing123/PDT_CWC_YOLO-DP.

Despite significant progress of generative models in the natural sciences, their controllability remains challenging. One fundamentally missing aspect of molecular or protein generative models is an inductive bias that can reflect continuous properties of interest. To that end, we propose the Regression Transformer (RT), a novel method that abstracts regression as a conditional sequence modeling problem. This introduces a new paradigm of multitask language models which seamlessly bridge sequence regression and conditional sequence generation. We thoroughly demonstrate that, despite using a nominal-scale training objective, the RT matches or surpasses the performance of conventional regression models in property prediction tasks of small molecules, proteins and chemical reactions. Critically, priming the same model with continuous properties yields a highly competitive conditional generative model that outperforms specialized approaches in a substructure-constrained, property-driven molecule generation benchmark. Our dichotomous approach is facilitated by a novel, alternating training scheme that enables the model to decorate seed sequences by desired properties, e.g., to optimize reaction yield. In sum, the RT is the first report of a multitask model that concurrently excels at predictive and generative tasks in biochemistry. This finds particular application in property-driven, local exploration of the chemical or protein space and could pave the road toward foundation models in material design. The code to reproduce all experiments of the paper is available at: https://github.com/IBM/regression-transformer

The rapid advancement of transformer-based language models has catalyzed breakthroughs in biomedical and clinical natural language processing; however, plant science remains markedly underserved by such domain-adapted tools. In this work, we present PlantBert, a high-performance, open-source language model specifically tailored for extracting structured knowledge from plant stress-response literature. Built upon the DeBERTa architecture-known for its disentangled attention and robust contextual encoding-PlantBert is fine-tuned on a meticulously curated corpus of expert-annotated abstracts, with a primary focus on lentil (Lens culinaris) responses to diverse abiotic and biotic stressors. Our methodology combines transformer-based modeling with rule-enhanced linguistic post-processing and ontology-grounded entity normalization, enabling PlantBert to capture biologically meaningful relationships with precision and semantic fidelity. The underlying corpus is annotated using a hierarchical schema aligned with the Crop Ontology, encompassing molecular, physiological, biochemical, and agronomic dimensions of plant adaptation. PlantBert exhibits strong generalization capabilities across entity types and demonstrates the feasibility of robust domain adaptation in low-resource scientific fields. By providing a scalable and reproducible framework for high-resolution entity recognition, PlantBert bridges a critical gap in agricultural NLP and paves the way for intelligent, data-driven systems in plant genomics, phenomics, and agronomic knowledge discovery. Our model is publicly released to promote transparency and accelerate cross-disciplinary innovation in computational plant science.

Pesticide application has been heavily used in the cultivation of major crops, contributing to the increase of crop production over the past decades. However, their appropriate use and calibration of machines rely upon evaluation methodologies that can precisely estimate how well the pesticides' spraying covered the crops. A few strategies have been proposed in former works, yet their elevated costs and low portability do not permit their wide adoption. This work introduces and experimentally assesses a novel tool that functions over a smartphone-based mobile application, named DropLeaf - Spraying Meter. Tests performed using DropLeaf demonstrated that, notwithstanding its versatility, it can estimate the pesticide spraying with high precision. Our methodology is based on image analysis, and the assessment of spraying deposition measures is performed successfully over real and synthetic water-sensitive papers. The proposed tool can be extensively used by farmers and agronomists furnished with regular smartphones, improving the utilization of pesticides with well-being, ecological, and monetary advantages. DropLeaf can be easily used for spray drift assessment of different methods, including emerging UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) sprayers.

Accurately detecting rice flowering time is crucial for timely pollination in hybrid rice seed production. This not only enhances pollination efficiency but also ensures higher yields. However, due to the complexity of field environments and the characteristics of rice spikelets, such as their small size and short flowering period, automated and precise recognition remains challenging. To address this, this study proposes a rice spikelet flowering recognition method based on an improved YOLOv8 object detection model. First, a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) replaces the original PANet structure to enhance feature fusion and improve multi-scale feature utilization. Second, to boost small object detection, a p2 small-object detection head is added, using finer feature mapping to reduce feature loss commonly seen in detecting small targets. Given the lack of publicly available datasets for rice spikelet flowering in field conditions, a high-resolution RGB camera and data augmentation techniques are used to construct a dedicated dataset, providing reliable support for model training and testing. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8s-p2 model achieves an [email protected] of 65.9%, precision of 67.6%, recall of 61.5%, and F1-score of 64.41%, representing improvements of 3.10%, 8.40%, 10.80%, and 9.79%, respectively, over the baseline YOLOv8. The model also runs at 69 f/s on the test set, meeting practical application requirements. Overall, the improved YOLOv8s-p2 offers high accuracy and speed, providing an effective solution for automated monitoring in hybrid rice seed production.

Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains nascent. To empirically test this ability, we enrolled OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4, in a three-month forecasting tournament hosted on the Metaculus platform. The tournament, running from July to October 2023, attracted 843 participants and covered diverse topics including Big Tech, U.S. politics, viral outbreaks, and the Ukraine conflict. Focusing on binary forecasts, we show that GPT-4's probabilistic forecasts are significantly less accurate than the median human-crowd forecasts. We find that GPT-4's forecasts did not significantly differ from the no-information forecasting strategy of assigning a 50% probability to every question. We explore a potential explanation, that GPT-4 might be predisposed to predict probabilities close to the midpoint of the scale, but our data do not support this hypothesis. Overall, we find that GPT-4 significantly underperforms in real-world predictive tasks compared to median human-crowd forecasts. A potential explanation for this underperformance is that in real-world forecasting tournaments, the true answers are genuinely unknown at the time of prediction; unlike in other benchmark tasks like professional exams or time series forecasting, where strong performance may at least partly be due to the answers being memorized from the training data. This makes real-world forecasting tournaments an ideal environment for testing the generalized reasoning and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence going forward.

In an era of increasing pressure to achieve sustainable agriculture, the optimization of livestock feed for enhancing yield and minimizing environmental impact is a paramount objective. This study presents a pioneering approach towards this goal, using rumen microbiome data to predict the efficacy of feed additives in dairy cattle. We collected an extensive dataset that includes methane emissions from 2,190 Holstein cows distributed across 34 distinct sites. The cows were divided into control and experimental groups in a double-blind, unbiased manner, accounting for variables such as age, days in lactation, and average milk yield. The experimental groups were administered one of four leading commercial feed additives: Agolin, Kexxtone, Allimax, and Relyon. Methane emissions were measured individually both before the administration of additives and over a subsequent 12-week period. To develop our predictive model for additive efficacy, rumen microbiome samples were collected from 510 cows from the same herds prior to the study's onset. These samples underwent deep metagenomic shotgun sequencing, yielding an average of 15.7 million reads per sample. Utilizing innovative artificial intelligence techniques we successfully estimated the efficacy of these feed additives across different farms. The model's robustness was further confirmed through validation with independent cohorts, affirming its generalizability and reliability. Our results underscore the transformative capability of using targeted feed additive strategies to both optimize dairy yield and milk composition, and to significantly reduce methane emissions. Specifically, our predictive model demonstrates a scenario where its application could guide the assignment of additives to farms where they are most effective. In doing so, we could achieve an average potential reduction of over 27\% in overall emissions.

Detecting objects in aerial images is challenging because they are typically composed of crowded small objects distributed non-uniformly over high-resolution images. Density cropping is a widely used method to improve this small object detection where the crowded small object regions are extracted and processed in high resolution. However, this is typically accomplished by adding other learnable components, thus complicating the training and inference over a standard detection process. In this paper, we propose an efficient Cascaded Zoom-in (CZ) detector that re-purposes the detector itself for density-guided training and inference. During training, density crops are located, labeled as a new class, and employed to augment the training dataset. During inference, the density crops are first detected along with the base class objects, and then input for a second stage of inference. This approach is easily integrated into any detector, and creates no significant change in the standard detection process, like the uniform cropping approach popular in aerial image detection. Experimental results on the aerial images of the challenging VisDrone and DOTA datasets verify the benefits of the proposed approach. The proposed CZ detector also provides state-of-the-art results over uniform cropping and other density cropping methods on the VisDrone dataset, increasing the detection mAP of small objects by more than 3 points.

An early, non-invasive, and on-site detection of nutrient deficiencies is critical to enable timely actions to prevent major losses of crops caused by lack of nutrients. While acquiring labeled data is very expensive, collecting images from multiple views of a crop is straightforward. Despite its relevance for practical applications, unsupervised domain adaptation where multiple views are available for the labeled source domain as well as the unlabeled target domain is an unexplored research area. In this work, we thus propose an approach that leverages multiple camera views in the source and target domain for unsupervised domain adaptation. We evaluate the proposed approach on two nutrient deficiency datasets. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets compared to other unsupervised domain adaptation methods. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/jh-yi/MV-Match.

Weed control is a critical challenge in modern agriculture, as weeds compete with crops for essential nutrient resources, significantly reducing crop yield and quality. Traditional weed control methods, including chemical and mechanical approaches, have real-life limitations such as associated environmental impact and efficiency. An emerging yet effective approach is laser weeding, which uses a laser beam as the stem cutter. Although there have been studies that use deep learning in weed recognition, its application in intelligent laser weeding still requires a comprehensive understanding. Thus, this study represents the first empirical investigation of weed recognition for laser weeding. To increase the efficiency of laser beam cut and avoid damaging the crops of interest, the laser beam shall be directly aimed at the weed root. Yet, weed stem detection remains an under-explored problem. We integrate the detection of crop and weed with the localization of weed stem into one end-to-end system. To train and validate the proposed system in a real-life scenario, we curate and construct a high-quality weed stem detection dataset with human annotations. The dataset consists of 7,161 high-resolution pictures collected in the field with annotations of 11,151 instances of weed. Experimental results show that the proposed system improves weeding accuracy by 6.7% and reduces energy cost by 32.3% compared to existing weed recognition systems.

Cricket, "a Gentleman's Game", is a prominent sport rising worldwide. Due to the rising competitiveness of the sport, players and team management have become more professional with their approach. Prior studies predicted individual performance or chose the best team but did not highlight the batter's potential. On the other hand, our research aims to evaluate a player's impact while considering his control in various circumstances. This paper seeks to understand the conundrum behind this impactful performance by determining how much control a player has over the circumstances and generating the "Effective Runs",a new measure we propose. We first gathered the fundamental cricket data from open-source datasets; however, variables like pitch, weather, and control were not readily available for all matches. As a result, we compiled our corpus data by analyzing the commentary of the match summaries. This gave us an insight into the particular game's weather and pitch conditions. Furthermore, ball-by-ball inspection from the commentary led us to determine the control of the shots played by the batter. We collected data for the entire One Day International career, up to February 2022, of 3 prominent cricket players: Rohit G Sharma, David A Warner, and Kane S Williamson. Lastly, to prepare the dataset, we encoded, scaled, and split the dataset to train and test Machine Learning Algorithms. We used Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Polynomial Regression, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Decision Tree Regression, and Random Forest Regression on each player's data individually to train them and predict the Impact the player will have on the game. Multiple Linear Regression and Random Forest give the best predictions accuracy of 90.16 percent and 87.12 percent, respectively.

Severe convective weather events, such as hail, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, often occur quickly yet cause significant damage, costing billions of dollars every year. This highlights the importance of forecasting severe weather threats hours in advance to better prepare meteorologists and residents in at-risk areas. Can modern large foundation models perform such forecasting? Existing weather benchmarks typically focus only on predicting time-series changes in certain weather parameters (e.g., temperature, moisture) with text-only features. In this work, we introduce WeatherQA, the first multimodal dataset designed for machines to reason about complex combinations of weather parameters (a.k.a., ingredients) and predict severe weather in real-world scenarios. The dataset includes over 8,000 (multi-images, text) pairs for diverse severe weather events. Each pair contains rich information crucial for forecasting -- the images describe the ingredients capturing environmental instability, surface observations, and radar reflectivity, and the text contains forecast analyses written by human experts. With WeatherQA, we evaluate state-of-the-art vision language models, including GPT4, Claude3.5, Gemini-1.5, and a fine-tuned Llama3-based VLM, by designing two challenging tasks: (1) multi-choice QA for predicting affected area and (2) classification of the development potential of severe convection. These tasks require deep understanding of domain knowledge (e.g., atmospheric dynamics) and complex reasoning over multimodal data (e.g., interactions between weather parameters). We show a substantial gap between the strongest VLM, GPT4o, and human reasoning. Our comprehensive case study with meteorologists further reveals the weaknesses of the models, suggesting that better training and data integration are necessary to bridge this gap. WeatherQA link: https://github.com/chengqianma/WeatherQA.

Multivariate probabilistic time series forecasts are commonly evaluated via proper scoring rules, i.e., functions that are minimal in expectation for the ground-truth distribution. However, this property is not sufficient to guarantee good discrimination in the non-asymptotic regime. In this paper, we provide the first systematic finite-sample study of proper scoring rules for time-series forecasting evaluation. Through a power analysis, we identify the "region of reliability" of a scoring rule, i.e., the set of practical conditions where it can be relied on to identify forecasting errors. We carry out our analysis on a comprehensive synthetic benchmark, specifically designed to test several key discrepancies between ground-truth and forecast distributions, and we gauge the generalizability of our findings to real-world tasks with an application to an electricity production problem. Our results reveal critical shortcomings in the evaluation of multivariate probabilistic forecasts as commonly performed in the literature.

The agriculture sector is essential for every country because it provides a basic income to a large number of people and food as well, which is a fundamental requirement to survive on this planet. We see as time passes, significant changes come in the present era, which begins with Green Revolution. Due to improper knowledge of plant diseases, farmers use fertilizers in excess, which ultimately degrade the quality of food. Earlier farmers use experts to determine the type of plant disease, which was expensive and time-consuming. In today time, Image processing is used to recognize and catalog plant diseases using the lesion region of plant leaf, and there are different modus-operandi for plant disease scent from leaf using Neural Networks (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and others. In this paper, we improving the architecture of the Neural Networking by working on ten different types of training algorithms and the proper choice of neurons in the concealed layer. Our proposed approach gives 98.30% accuracy on general plant leaf disease and 100% accuracy on specific plant leaf disease based on Bayesian regularization, automation of cluster and without over-fitting on considered plant diseases over various other implemented methods.

Decisions in agriculture are increasingly data-driven; however, valuable agricultural knowledge is often locked away in free-text reports, manuals and journal articles. Specialised search systems are needed that can mine agricultural information to provide relevant answers to users' questions. This paper presents AgAsk -- an agent able to answer natural language agriculture questions by mining scientific documents. We carefully survey and analyse farmers' information needs. On the basis of these needs we release an information retrieval test collection comprising real questions, a large collection of scientific documents split in passages, and ground truth relevance assessments indicating which passages are relevant to each question. We implement and evaluate a number of information retrieval models to answer farmers questions, including two state-of-the-art neural ranking models. We show that neural rankers are highly effective at matching passages to questions in this context. Finally, we propose a deployment architecture for AgAsk that includes a client based on the Telegram messaging platform and retrieval model deployed on commodity hardware. The test collection we provide is intended to stimulate more research in methods to match natural language to answers in scientific documents. While the retrieval models were evaluated in the agriculture domain, they are generalisable and of interest to others working on similar problems. The test collection is available at: https://github.com/ielab/agvaluate.

Forecasting is an important task in many domains, such as technology and economics. However existing forecasting benchmarks largely lack comprehensive confidence assessment, focus on limited question types, and often consist of artificial questions that do not align with real-world human forecasting needs. To address these gaps, we introduce FOReCAst (Future Outcome Reasoning and Confidence Assessment), a benchmark that evaluates models' ability to make predictions and their confidence in them. FOReCAst spans diverse forecasting scenarios involving Boolean questions, timeframe prediction, and quantity estimation, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of both prediction accuracy and confidence calibration for real-world applications.

Pest and disease control plays a key role in agriculture since the damage caused by these agents are responsible for a huge economic loss every year. Based on this assumption, we create an algorithm capable of detecting rust (Hemileia vastatrix) and leaf miner (Leucoptera coffeella) in coffee leaves (Coffea arabica) and quantify disease severity using a mobile application as a high-level interface for the model inferences. We used different convolutional neural network architectures to create the object detector, besides the OpenCV library, k-means, and three treatments: the RGB and value to quantification, and the AFSoft software, in addition to the analysis of variance, where we compare the three methods. The results show an average precision of 81,5% in the detection and that there was no significant statistical difference between treatments to quantify the severity of coffee leaves, proposing a computationally less costly method. The application, together with the trained model, can detect the pest and disease over different image conditions and infection stages and also estimate the disease infection stage.

Recent progress in neural forecasting accelerated improvements in the performance of large-scale forecasting systems. Yet, long-horizon forecasting remains a very difficult task. Two common challenges afflicting the task are the volatility of the predictions and their computational complexity. We introduce N-HiTS, a model which addresses both challenges by incorporating novel hierarchical interpolation and multi-rate data sampling techniques. These techniques enable the proposed method to assemble its predictions sequentially, emphasizing components with different frequencies and scales while decomposing the input signal and synthesizing the forecast. We prove that the hierarchical interpolation technique can efficiently approximate arbitrarily long horizons in the presence of smoothness. Additionally, we conduct extensive large-scale dataset experiments from the long-horizon forecasting literature, demonstrating the advantages of our method over the state-of-the-art methods, where N-HiTS provides an average accuracy improvement of almost 20% over the latest Transformer architectures while reducing the computation time by an order of magnitude (50 times). Our code is available at bit.ly/3VA5DoT

Triggered by the realization that AI emulators can rival the performance of traditional numerical weather prediction models running on HPC systems, there is now an increasing number of large AI models that address use cases such as forecasting, downscaling, or nowcasting. While the parallel developments in the AI literature focus on foundation models -- models that can be effectively tuned to address multiple, different use cases -- the developments on the weather and climate side largely focus on single-use cases with particular emphasis on mid-range forecasting. We close this gap by introducing Prithvi WxC, a 2.3 billion parameter foundation model developed using 160 variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). Prithvi WxC employs an encoder-decoder-based architecture, incorporating concepts from various recent transformer models to effectively capture both regional and global dependencies in the input data. The model has been designed to accommodate large token counts to model weather phenomena in different topologies at fine resolutions. Furthermore, it is trained with a mixed objective that combines the paradigms of masked reconstruction with forecasting. We test the model on a set of challenging downstream tasks namely: Autoregressive rollout forecasting, Downscaling, Gravity wave flux parameterization, and Extreme events estimation. The pretrained model with 2.3 billion parameters, along with the associated fine-tuning workflows, has been publicly released as an open-source contribution via Hugging Face.

Designing robust and accurate predictive models for stock price prediction has been an active area of research for a long time. While on one side, the supporters of the efficient market hypothesis claim that it is impossible to forecast stock prices accurately, many researchers believe otherwise. There exist propositions in the literature that have demonstrated that if properly designed and optimized, predictive models can very accurately and reliably predict future values of stock prices. This paper presents a suite of deep learning based models for stock price prediction. We use the historical records of the NIFTY 50 index listed in the National Stock Exchange of India, during the period from December 29, 2008 to July 31, 2020, for training and testing the models. Our proposition includes two regression models built on convolutional neural networks and three long and short term memory network based predictive models. To forecast the open values of the NIFTY 50 index records, we adopted a multi step prediction technique with walk forward validation. In this approach, the open values of the NIFTY 50 index are predicted on a time horizon of one week, and once a week is over, the actual index values are included in the training set before the model is trained again, and the forecasts for the next week are made. We present detailed results on the forecasting accuracies for all our proposed models. The results show that while all the models are very accurate in forecasting the NIFTY 50 open values, the univariate encoder decoder convolutional LSTM with the previous two weeks data as the input is the most accurate model. On the other hand, a univariate CNN model with previous one week data as the input is found to be the fastest model in terms of its execution speed.

Accurate stock market predictions following earnings reports are crucial for investors. Traditional methods, particularly classical machine learning models, struggle with these predictions because they cannot effectively process and interpret extensive textual data contained in earnings reports and often overlook nuances that influence market movements. This paper introduces an advanced approach by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) instruction fine-tuned with a novel combination of instruction-based techniques and quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) compression. Our methodology integrates 'base factors', such as financial metric growth and earnings transcripts, with 'external factors', including recent market indices performances and analyst grades, to create a rich, supervised dataset. This comprehensive dataset enables our models to achieve superior predictive performance in terms of accuracy, weighted F1, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), especially evident in the comparison with benchmarks such as GPT-4. We specifically highlight the efficacy of the llama-3-8b-Instruct-4bit model, which showcases significant improvements over baseline models. The paper also discusses the potential of expanding the output capabilities to include a 'Hold' option and extending the prediction horizon, aiming to accommodate various investment styles and time frames. This study not only demonstrates the power of integrating cutting-edge AI with fine-tuned financial data but also paves the way for future research in enhancing AI-driven financial analysis tools.

The UAV technology is gradually maturing and can provide extremely powerful support for smart agriculture and precise monitoring. Currently, there is no dataset related to green walnuts in the field of agricultural computer vision. Thus, in order to promote the algorithm design in the field of agricultural computer vision, we used UAV to collect remote-sensing data from 8 walnut sample plots. Considering that green walnuts are subject to various lighting conditions and occlusion, we constructed a large-scale dataset with a higher-granularity of target features - WalnutData. This dataset contains a total of 30,240 images and 706,208 instances, and there are 4 target categories: being illuminated by frontal light and unoccluded (A1), being backlit and unoccluded (A2), being illuminated by frontal light and occluded (B1), and being backlit and occluded (B2). Subsequently, we evaluated many mainstream algorithms on WalnutData and used these evaluation results as the baseline standard. The dataset and all evaluation results can be obtained at https://github.com/1wuming/WalnutData.

We introduce a novel machine learning model for credit risk by combining tree-boosting with a latent spatio-temporal Gaussian process model accounting for frailty correlation. This allows for modeling non-linearities and interactions among predictor variables in a flexible data-driven manner and for accounting for spatio-temporal variation that is not explained by observable predictor variables. We also show how estimation and prediction can be done in a computationally efficient manner. In an application to a large U.S. mortgage credit risk data set, we find that both predictive default probabilities for individual loans and predictive loan portfolio loss distributions obtained with our novel approach are more accurate compared to conventional independent linear hazard models and also linear spatio-temporal models. Using interpretability tools for machine learning models, we find that the likely reasons for this outperformance are strong interaction and non-linear effects in the predictor variables and the presence of large spatio-temporal frailty effects.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in three-dimensional (3D) agricultural research, particularly for maize, has been limited by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse datasets. While 2D image datasets are abundant, they fail to capture essential structural details such as leaf architecture, plant volume, and spatial arrangements that 3D data provide. To address this limitation, we present AgriField3D (https://baskargroup.github.io/AgriField3D/), a curated dataset of 3D point clouds of field-grown maize plants from a diverse genetic panel, designed to be AI-ready for advancing agricultural research. Our dataset comprises over 1,000 high-quality point clouds collected using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner, complemented by procedural models that provide structured, parametric representations of maize plants. These procedural models, generated using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and optimized via a two-step process combining Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and differentiable programming, enable precise, scalable reconstructions of leaf surfaces and plant architectures. To enhance usability, we performed graph-based segmentation to isolate individual leaves and stalks, ensuring consistent labeling across all samples. We also conducted rigorous manual quality control on all datasets, correcting errors in segmentation, ensuring accurate leaf ordering, and validating metadata annotations. The dataset further includes metadata detailing plant morphology and quality, alongside multi-resolution subsampled versions (100k, 50k, 10k points) optimized for various computational needs. By integrating point cloud data of field grown plants with high-fidelity procedural models and ensuring meticulous manual validation, AgriField3D provides a comprehensive foundation for AI-driven phenotyping, plant structural analysis, and 3D applications in agricultural research.

In medical applications, deep learning methods are built to automate diagnostic tasks. However, a clinically relevant question that practitioners usually face, is how to predict the future trajectory of a disease (prognosis). Current methods for such a problem often require domain knowledge, and are complicated to apply. In this paper, we formulate the prognosis prediction problem as a one-to-many forecasting problem from multimodal data. Inspired by a clinical decision-making process with two agents -- a radiologist and a general practitioner, we model a prognosis prediction problem with two transformer-based components that share information between each other. The first block in this model aims to analyze the imaging data, and the second block leverages the internal representations of the first one as inputs, also fusing them with auxiliary patient data. We show the effectiveness of our method in predicting the development of structural knee osteoarthritis changes over time. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of various performance metrics. In addition, we empirically show that the existence of the multi-agent transformers with depths of 2 is sufficient to achieve good performances. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MIPT-Oulu/CLIMAT.

Automatic monitoring of tree plantations plays a crucial role in agriculture. Flawless monitoring of tree health helps farmers make informed decisions regarding their management by taking appropriate action. Use of drone images for automatic plantation monitoring can enhance the accuracy of the monitoring process, while still being affordable to small farmers in developing countries such as India. Small, low cost drones equipped with an RGB camera can capture high-resolution images of agricultural fields, allowing for detailed analysis of the well-being of the plantations. Existing methods of automated plantation monitoring are mostly based on satellite images, which are difficult to get for the farmers. We propose an automated system for plantation health monitoring using drone images, which are becoming easier to get for the farmers. We propose a dataset of images of trees with three categories: ``Good health", ``Stunted", and ``Dead". We annotate the dataset using CVAT annotation tool, for use in research purposes. We experiment with different well-known CNN models to observe their performance on the proposed dataset. The initial low accuracy levels show the complexity of the proposed dataset. Further, our study revealed that, depth-wise convolution operation embedded in a deep CNN model, can enhance the performance of the model on drone dataset. Further, we apply state-of-the-art object detection models to identify individual trees to better monitor them automatically.

Renewable energy forecasting is attaining greater importance due to its constant increase in contribution to the electrical power grids. Solar energy is one of the most significant contributors to renewable energy and is dependent on solar irradiation. For the effective management of electrical power grids, forecasting models that predict solar irradiation, with high accuracy, are needed. In the current study, Machine Learning techniques such as Linear Regression, Extreme Gradient Boosting and Genetic Algorithm Optimization are used to forecast solar irradiation. The data used for training and validation is recorded from across three different geographical stations in the United States that are part of the SURFRAD network. A Global Horizontal Index (GHI) is predicted for the models built and compared. Genetic Algorithm Optimization is applied to XGB to further improve the accuracy of solar irradiation prediction.

Analyzing and detecting cannabis seed variants is crucial for the agriculture industry. It enables precision breeding, allowing cultivators to selectively enhance desirable traits. Accurate identification of seed variants also ensures regulatory compliance, facilitating the cultivation of specific cannabis strains with defined characteristics, ultimately improving agricultural productivity and meeting diverse market demands. This paper presents a study on cannabis seed variant detection by employing a state-of-the-art object detection model Faster R-CNN. This study implemented the model on a locally sourced cannabis seed dataset in Thailand, comprising 17 distinct classes. We evaluate six Faster R-CNN models by comparing performance on various metrics and achieving a mAP score of 94.08\% and an F1 score of 95.66\%. This paper presents the first known application of deep neural network object detection models to the novel task of visually identifying cannabis seed types.

Traditional time-series forecasting often focuses only on minimizing prediction errors, ignoring the specific requirements of real-world applications that employ them. This paper presents a new training methodology, which allows a forecasting model to dynamically adjust its focus based on the importance of forecast ranges specified by the end application. Unlike previous methods that fix these ranges beforehand, our training approach breaks down predictions over the entire signal range into smaller segments, which are then dynamically weighted and combined to produce accurate forecasts. We tested our method on standard datasets, including a new dataset from wireless communication, and found that not only it improves prediction accuracy but also improves the performance of end application employing the forecasting model. This research provides a basis for creating forecasting systems that better connect prediction and decision-making in various practical applications.

Digital agriculture has evolved significantly over the last few years due to the technological developments in automation and computational intelligence applied to the agricultural sector, including vineyards which are a relevant crop in the Mediterranean region. In this work, a study is presented of semantic segmentation for vine detection in real-world vineyards by exploring state-of-the-art deep segmentation networks and conventional unsupervised methods. Camera data have been collected on vineyards using an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) equipped with a dual imaging sensor payload, namely a high-definition RGB camera and a five-band multispectral and thermal camera. Extensive experiments using deep-segmentation networks and unsupervised methods have been performed on multimodal datasets representing four distinct vineyards located in the central region of Portugal. The reported results indicate that SegNet, U-Net, and ModSegNet have equivalent overall performance in vine segmentation. The results also show that multimodality slightly improves the performance of vine segmentation, but the NIR spectrum alone generally is sufficient on most of the datasets. Furthermore, results suggest that high-definition RGB images produce equivalent or higher performance than any lower resolution multispectral band combination. Lastly, Deep Learning (DL) networks have higher overall performance than classical methods. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Cybonic/DL_vineyard_segmentation_study.git

We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is important to both farmers and researchers to detect anomalies and develop predictive models for plant growth. The availability of high-quality, off-the-shelf structure-from-motion (SfM) and photogrammetry packages has enabled a vibrant community of roboticists to apply computer vision for non-destructive plant monitoring. While existing approaches tend to focus on either high-throughput (e.g. satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), vehicle-mounted, conveyor-belt imagery) or high-accuracy/robustness to occlusions (e.g. turn-table scanner or robot arm), we propose a middle-ground that achieves high accuracy with a medium-throughput, highly automated robot. Our design pairs the workspace scalability of a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) with the dexterity of a 4 degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot arm to autonomously image many plants from a variety of viewpoints. We describe our robot design and demonstrate it experimentally by collecting daily photographs of 54 plants from 64 viewpoints each. We show that our approach can produce scientifically useful measurements, operate fully autonomously after initial calibration, and produce better reconstructions and plant property estimates than those of over-canopy methods (e.g. UAV). As example applications, we show that our system can successfully estimate plant mass with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.586g and, when used to perform hypothesis testing on the relationship between mass and age, produces p-values comparable to ground-truth data (p=0.0020 and p=0.0016, respectively).

Machine learning (ML)-based weather models have rapidly risen to prominence due to their greater accuracy and speed than traditional forecasts based on numerical weather prediction (NWP), recently outperforming traditional ensembles in global probabilistic weather forecasting. This paper presents FGN, a simple, scalable and flexible modeling approach which significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art models. FGN generates ensembles via learned model-perturbations with an ensemble of appropriately constrained models. It is trained directly to minimize the continuous rank probability score (CRPS) of per-location forecasts. It produces state-of-the-art ensemble forecasts as measured by a range of deterministic and probabilistic metrics, makes skillful ensemble tropical cyclone track predictions, and captures joint spatial structure despite being trained only on marginals.

The traditional deep learning paradigm that solely relies on labeled data has limitations in representing the spatial relationships between farmland elements and the surrounding environment.It struggles to effectively model the dynamic temporal evolution and spatial heterogeneity of farmland. Language,as a structured knowledge carrier,can explicitly express the spatiotemporal characteristics of farmland, such as its shape, distribution,and surrounding environmental information.Therefore,a language-driven learning paradigm can effectively alleviate the challenges posed by the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of farmland.However,in the field of remote sensing imagery of farmland,there is currently no comprehensive benchmark dataset to support this research direction.To fill this gap,we introduced language based descriptions of farmland and developed FarmSeg-VL dataset,the first fine-grained image-text dataset designed for spatiotemporal farmland segmentation.Firstly, this article proposed a semi-automatic annotation method that can accurately assign caption to each image, ensuring high data quality and semantic richness while improving the efficiency of dataset construction.Secondly,the FarmSeg-VL exhibits significant spatiotemporal characteristics.In terms of the temporal dimension,it covers all four seasons.In terms of the spatial dimension,it covers eight typical agricultural regions across China.In addition, in terms of captions,FarmSeg-VL covers rich spatiotemporal characteristics of farmland,including its inherent properties,phenological characteristics, spatial distribution,topographic and geomorphic features,and the distribution of surrounding environments.Finally,we present a performance analysis of VLMs and the deep learning models that rely solely on labels trained on the FarmSeg-VL,demonstrating its potential as a standard benchmark for farmland segmentation.

Despite progress in AI-based plant diagnostics, sugarcane farmers in low-resource regions remain vulnerable to leaf diseases due to the lack of scalable, efficient, and interpretable tools. Many deep learning models fail to generalize under real-world conditions and require substantial computational resources, limiting their use in resource-constrained regions. In this paper, we present SugarcaneLD-BD, a curated dataset for sugarcane leaf-disease classification; SugarcaneShuffleNet, an optimized lightweight model for rapid on-device diagnosis; and SugarcaneAI, a Progressive Web Application for field deployment. SugarcaneLD-BD contains 638 curated images across five classes, including four major sugarcane diseases, collected in Bangladesh under diverse field conditions and verified by expert pathologists. To enhance diversity, we combined SugarcaneLD-BD with two additional datasets, yielding a larger and more representative corpus. Our optimized model, SugarcaneShuffleNet, offers the best trade-off between speed and accuracy for real-time, on-device diagnosis. This 9.26 MB model achieved 98.02% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.98, and an average inference time of 4.14 ms per image. For comparison, we fine-tuned five other lightweight convolutional neural networks: MnasNet, EdgeNeXt, EfficientNet-Lite, MobileNet, and SqueezeNet via transfer learning and Bayesian optimization. MnasNet and EdgeNeXt achieved comparable accuracy to SugarcaneShuffleNet, but required significantly more parameters, memory, and computation, limiting their suitability for low-resource deployment. We integrate SugarcaneShuffleNet into SugarcaneAI, delivering Grad-CAM-based explanations in the field. Together, these contributions offer a diverse benchmark, efficient models for low-resource environments, and a practical tool for sugarcane disease classification. It spans varied lighting, backgrounds and devices used on-farm

Food security is a complex, multidimensional concept challenging to measure comprehensively. Effective anticipation, monitoring, and mitigation of food crises require timely and comprehensive global data. This paper introduces the Harmonized Food Insecurity Dataset (HFID), an open-source resource consolidating four key data sources: the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)/Cadre Harmonis\'e (CH) phases, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) IPC-compatible phases, and the World Food Program's (WFP) Food Consumption Score (FCS) and reduced Coping Strategy Index (rCSI). Updated monthly and using a common reference system for administrative units, the HFID offers extensive spatial and temporal coverage. It serves as a vital tool for food security experts and humanitarian agencies, providing a unified resource for analyzing food security conditions and highlighting global data disparities. The scientific community can also leverage the HFID to develop data-driven predictive models, enhancing the capacity to forecast and prevent future food crises.

A database of images of approximately 960 unique plants belonging to 12 species at several growth stages is made publicly available. It comprises annotated RGB images with a physical resolution of roughly 10 pixels per mm. To standardise the evaluation of classification results obtained with the database, a benchmark based on f_{1} scores is proposed. The dataset is available at https://vision.eng.au.dk/plant-seedlings-dataset

Weather forecasts are fundamentally uncertain, so predicting the range of probable weather scenarios is crucial for important decisions, from warning the public about hazardous weather, to planning renewable energy use. Here, we introduce GenCast, a probabilistic weather model with greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world, the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts (ECMWF)'s ensemble forecast, ENS. Unlike traditional approaches, which are based on numerical weather prediction (NWP), GenCast is a machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) method, trained on decades of reanalysis data. GenCast generates an ensemble of stochastic 15-day global forecasts, at 12-hour steps and 0.25 degree latitude-longitude resolution, for over 80 surface and atmospheric variables, in 8 minutes. It has greater skill than ENS on 97.4% of 1320 targets we evaluated, and better predicts extreme weather, tropical cyclones, and wind power production. This work helps open the next chapter in operational weather forecasting, where critical weather-dependent decisions are made with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-resolution wealth maps that can be leveraged across multiple causal trials. However, because standard training objectives prioritize overall predictive accuracy, these predictions inherently suffer from shrinkage toward the mean, leading to attenuated estimates of causal treatment effects and limiting their utility in policy. Existing debiasing methods, such as Prediction-Powered Inference, can handle this attenuation bias but require additional fresh ground-truth data at the downstream stage of causal inference, which restricts their applicability in data-scarce environments. Here, we introduce and evaluate two correction methods -- linear calibration correction and Tweedie's correction -- that substantially reduce prediction bias without relying on newly collected labeled data. Linear calibration corrects bias through a straightforward linear transformation derived from held-out calibration data, whereas Tweedie's correction leverages empirical Bayes principles to directly address shrinkage-induced biases by exploiting score functions derived from the model's learning patterns. Through analytical exercises and experiments using Demographic and Health Survey data, we demonstrate that the proposed methods meet or outperform existing approaches that either require (a) adjustments to training pipelines or (b) additional labeled data. These approaches may represent a promising avenue for improving the reliability of causal inference when direct outcome measures are limited or unavailable, enabling a "one map, many trials" paradigm where a single upstream data creation team produces predictions usable by many downstream teams across diverse ML pipelines.

In recent years, the development of robust multi-source models has emerged in the Earth Observation (EO) field. These are models that leverage data from diverse sources to improve predictive accuracy when there is missing data. Despite these advancements, the factors influencing the varying effectiveness of such models remain poorly understood. In this study, we evaluate the predictive performance of six state-of-the-art multi-source models in predicting scenarios where either a single data source is missing or only a single source is available. Our analysis reveals that the efficacy of these models is intricately tied to the nature of the task, the complementarity among data sources, and the model design. Surprisingly, we observe instances where the removal of certain data sources leads to improved predictive performance, challenging the assumption that incorporating all available data is always beneficial. These findings prompt critical reflections on model complexity and the necessity of all collected data sources, potentially shaping the way for more streamlined approaches in EO applications.

Machine learning models are often used to inform real world risk assessment tasks: predicting consumer default risk, predicting whether a person suffers from a serious illness, or predicting a person's risk to appear in court. Given multiple models that perform almost equally well for a prediction task, to what extent do predictions vary across these models? If predictions are relatively consistent for similar models, then the standard approach of choosing the model that optimizes a penalized loss suffices. But what if predictions vary significantly for similar models? In machine learning, this is referred to as predictive multiplicity i.e. the prevalence of conflicting predictions assigned by near-optimal competing models. In this paper, we present a framework for measuring predictive multiplicity in probabilistic classification (predicting the probability of a positive outcome). We introduce measures that capture the variation in risk estimates over the set of competing models, and develop optimization-based methods to compute these measures efficiently and reliably for convex empirical risk minimization problems. We demonstrate the incidence and prevalence of predictive multiplicity in real-world tasks. Further, we provide insight into how predictive multiplicity arises by analyzing the relationship between predictive multiplicity and data set characteristics (outliers, separability, and majority-minority structure). Our results emphasize the need to report predictive multiplicity more widely.

We present Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost), an algorithm for generic probabilistic prediction via gradient boosting. Typical regression models return a point estimate, conditional on covariates, but probabilistic regression models output a full probability distribution over the outcome space, conditional on the covariates. This allows for predictive uncertainty estimation -- crucial in applications like healthcare and weather forecasting. NGBoost generalizes gradient boosting to probabilistic regression by treating the parameters of the conditional distribution as targets for a multiparameter boosting algorithm. Furthermore, we show how the Natural Gradient is required to correct the training dynamics of our multiparameter boosting approach. NGBoost can be used with any base learner, any family of distributions with continuous parameters, and any scoring rule. NGBoost matches or exceeds the performance of existing methods for probabilistic prediction while offering additional benefits in flexibility, scalability, and usability. An open-source implementation is available at github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ngboost.

Weather forecasting is a fundamental problem for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recently, data-driven approaches for weather forecasting based on deep learning have shown great promise, achieving accuracies that are competitive with operational systems. However, those methods often employ complex, customized architectures without sufficient ablation analysis, making it difficult to understand what truly contributes to their success. Here we introduce Stormer, a simple transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on weather forecasting with minimal changes to the standard transformer backbone. We identify the key components of Stormer through careful empirical analyses, including weather-specific embedding, randomized dynamics forecast, and pressure-weighted loss. At the core of Stormer is a randomized forecasting objective that trains the model to forecast the weather dynamics over varying time intervals. During inference, this allows us to produce multiple forecasts for a target lead time and combine them to obtain better forecast accuracy. On WeatherBench 2, Stormer performs competitively at short to medium-range forecasts and outperforms current methods beyond 7 days, while requiring orders-of-magnitude less training data and compute. Additionally, we demonstrate Stormer's favorable scaling properties, showing consistent improvements in forecast accuracy with increases in model size and training tokens. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tung-nd/stormer.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has recently emerged as a promising tool for many agricultural applications; however, the technology cannot be directly used in a real-time system due to the extensive time needed to process large volumes of data. Consequently, the development of a simple, compact, and cost-effective imaging system is not possible with the current HSI systems. Therefore, the overall goal of this study was to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images through deep learning for agricultural applications. Specifically, this study used Hyperspectral Convolutional Neural Network - Dense (HSCNN-D) to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images for predicting soluble solid content (SSC) in sweet potatoes. The algorithm accurately reconstructed the hyperspectral images from RGB images, with the resulting spectra closely matching the ground-truth. The partial least squares regression (PLSR) model based on reconstructed spectra outperformed the model using the full spectral range, demonstrating its potential for SSC prediction in sweet potatoes. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning-based hyperspectral image reconstruction as a low-cost, efficient tool for various agricultural uses.

Plant diseases pose significant threats to agriculture. It necessitates proper diagnosis and effective treatment to safeguard crop yields. To automate the diagnosis process, image segmentation is usually adopted for precisely identifying diseased regions, thereby advancing precision agriculture. Developing robust image segmentation models for plant diseases demands high-quality annotations across numerous images. However, existing plant disease datasets typically lack segmentation labels and are often confined to controlled laboratory settings, which do not adequately reflect the complexity of natural environments. Motivated by this fact, we established PlantSeg, a large-scale segmentation dataset for plant diseases. PlantSeg distinguishes itself from existing datasets in three key aspects. (1) Annotation type: Unlike the majority of existing datasets that only contain class labels or bounding boxes, each image in PlantSeg includes detailed and high-quality segmentation masks, associated with plant types and disease names. (2) Image source: Unlike typical datasets that contain images from laboratory settings, PlantSeg primarily comprises in-the-wild plant disease images. This choice enhances the practical applicability, as the trained models can be applied for integrated disease management. (3) Scale: PlantSeg is extensive, featuring 11,400 images with disease segmentation masks and an additional 8,000 healthy plant images categorized by plant type. Extensive technical experiments validate the high quality of PlantSeg's annotations. This dataset not only allows researchers to evaluate their image classification methods but also provides a critical foundation for developing and benchmarking advanced plant disease segmentation algorithms.

Accurate estimates of Above Ground Biomass (AGB) are essential in addressing two of humanity's biggest challenges, climate change and biodiversity loss. Existing datasets for AGB estimation from satellite imagery are limited. Either they focus on specific, local regions at high resolution, or they offer global coverage at low resolution. There is a need for a machine learning-ready, globally representative, high-resolution benchmark. Our findings indicate significant variability in biomass estimates across different vegetation types, emphasizing the necessity for a dataset that accurately captures global diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce a comprehensive new dataset that is globally distributed, covers a range of vegetation types, and spans several years. This dataset combines AGB reference data from the GEDI mission with data from Sentinel-2 and PALSAR-2 imagery. Additionally, it includes pre-processed high-level features such as a dense canopy height map, an elevation map, and a land-cover classification map. We also produce a dense, high-resolution (10m) map of AGB predictions for the entire area covered by the dataset. Rigorously tested, our dataset is accompanied by several benchmark models and is publicly available. It can be easily accessed using a single line of code, offering a solid basis for efforts towards global AGB estimation. The GitHub repository github.com/ghjuliasialelli/AGBD serves as a one-stop shop for all code and data.

Floods wreak havoc throughout the world, causing billions of dollars in damages, and uprooting communities, ecosystems and economies. The NASA Impact Flood Detection competition tasked participants with predicting flooded pixels after training with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in a supervised setting. We propose a semi-supervised learning pseudo-labeling scheme that derives confidence estimates from U-Net ensembles, progressively improving accuracy. Concretely, we use a cyclical approach involving multiple stages (1) training an ensemble model of multiple U-Net architectures with the provided high confidence hand-labeled data and, generated pseudo labels or low confidence labels on the entire unlabeled test dataset, and then, (2) filter out quality generated labels and, (3) combine the generated labels with the previously available high confidence hand-labeled dataset. This assimilated dataset is used for the next round of training ensemble models and the cyclical process is repeated until the performance improvement plateaus. We post process our results with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the Sentinel-1 dataset with 0.7654 IoU, an impressive improvement over the 0.60 IoU baseline. Our method, which we release with all the code and models, can also be used as an open science benchmark for the Sentinel-1 dataset.

We curate a dataset AgMMU for evaluating and developing vision-language models (VLMs) to produce factually accurate answers for knowledge-intensive expert domains. Our AgMMU concentrates on one of the most socially beneficial domains, agriculture, which requires connecting detailed visual observation with precise knowledge to diagnose, e.g., pest identification, management instructions, etc. As a core uniqueness of our dataset, all facts, questions, and answers are extracted from 116,231 conversations between real-world users and authorized agricultural experts. After a three-step dataset curation pipeline with GPT-4o, LLaMA models, and human verification, AgMMU features an evaluation set of 5,460 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and open-ended questions (OEQs). We also provide a development set that contains 205,399 pieces of agricultural knowledge information, including disease identification, symptoms descriptions, management instructions, insect and pest identification, and species identification. As a multimodal factual dataset, it reveals that existing VLMs face significant challenges with questions requiring both detailed perception and factual knowledge. Moreover, open-source VLMs still demonstrate a substantial performance gap compared to proprietary ones. To advance knowledge-intensive VLMs, we conduct fine-tuning experiments using our development set, which improves LLaVA-1.5 evaluation accuracy by up to 3.1%. We hope that AgMMU can serve both as an evaluation benchmark dedicated to agriculture and a development suite for incorporating knowledge-intensive expertise into general-purpose VLMs.

Generally, the identification and classification of plant diseases and/or pests are performed by an expert . One of the problems facing coffee farmers in Brazil is crop infestation, particularly by leaf rust Hemileia vastatrix and leaf miner Leucoptera coffeella. The progression of the diseases and or pests occurs spatially and temporarily. So, it is very important to automatically identify the degree of severity. The main goal of this article consists on the development of a method and its i implementation as an App that allow the detection of the foliar damages from images of coffee leaf that are captured using a smartphone, and identify whether it is rust or leaf miner, and in turn the calculation of its severity degree. The method consists of identifying a leaf from the image and separates it from the background with the use of a segmentation algorithm. In the segmentation process, various types of backgrounds for the image using the HSV and YCbCr color spaces are tested. In the segmentation of foliar damages, the Otsu algorithm and the iterative threshold algorithm, in the YCgCr color space, have been used and compared to k-means. Next, features of the segmented foliar damages are calculated. For the classification, artificial neural network trained with extreme learning machine have been used. The results obtained shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach to identify and classify foliar damages, and the automatic calculation of the severity. The results obtained are very promising according to experts.

The pulp and paper manufacturing industry requires precise quality control to ensure pure, contaminant-free end products suitable for various applications. Fungal spore concentration is a crucial metric that affects paper usability, and current testing methods are labor-intensive with delayed results, hindering real-time control strategies. To address this, a machine learning algorithm utilizing time-series data and domain knowledge was proposed. The optimal model employed Ridge Regression achieving an MSE of 2.90 on training and validation data. This approach could lead to significant improvements in efficiency and sustainability by providing real-time predictions for fungal spore concentrations. This paper showcases a promising method for real-time fungal spore concentration prediction, enabling stringent quality control measures in the pulp-and-paper industry.

We present Timer-XL, a generative Transformer for unified time series forecasting. To uniformly predict 1D and 2D time series, we generalize next token prediction, predominantly adopted for causal generation of 1D sequences, to multivariate next token prediction. The proposed paradigm uniformly formulates various forecasting scenarios as a long-context generation problem. We opt for the generative Transformer, which can capture global-range and causal dependencies while providing contextual flexibility, to implement unified forecasting on univariate series characterized by non-stationarity, multivariate time series with complicated dynamics and correlations, and covariate-informed contexts that include both endogenous and exogenous variables. Technically, we propose a universal TimeAttention to facilitate generative Transformers on time series, which can effectively capture fine-grained intra- and inter-series dependencies of flattened time series tokens (patches) and is further strengthened by position embeddings in both temporal and variable dimensions. Timer-XL achieves state-of-the-art performance across challenging forecasting benchmarks through a unified approach. As a large time series model, it demonstrates notable model transferability by large-scale pre-training, as well as contextual flexibility in token lengths, positioning it as a one-for-all forecaster.

This dataset represents almost all the harmful diseases for rice in Bangladesh. This dataset consists of 1106 image of five harmful diseases called Brown Spot, Leaf Scaled, Rice Blast, Rice Turngo, Steath Blight in two different background variation named field background picture and white background picture. Two different background variation helps the dataset to perform more accurately so that the user can use this data for field use as well as white background for decision making. The data is collected from rice field of Dhaka Division. This dataset can use for rice leaf diseases classification, diseases detection using Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for different rice leaf disease.

Earth observation (EO) applications involving complex and heterogeneous data sources are commonly approached with machine learning models. However, there is a common assumption that data sources will be persistently available. Different situations could affect the availability of EO sources, like noise, clouds, or satellite mission failures. In this work, we assess the impact of missing temporal and static EO sources in trained models across four datasets with classification and regression tasks. We compare the predictive quality of different methods and find that some are naturally more robust to missing data. The Ensemble strategy, in particular, achieves a prediction robustness up to 100%. We evidence that missing scenarios are significantly more challenging in regression than classification tasks. Finally, we find that the optical view is the most critical view when it is missing individually.