U-FedTomAtt: Ultra-lightweight Federated Learning with Attention for Tomato Disease Recognition

The world population is growing rapidly, and technology is improving in parallel. Meeting the huge demand for food for these 7 billion people not only depends on increasing food production but also on reducing food loss. Crop losses due to disease affect both the food supply and the financial and economic stability of a country. Tomatoes are among the top food-producing crops globally, and a significant portion of this production is lost due to disease. People have used Machine Learning techniques for feature extraction and early diagnosis of tomato diseases, and nowadays, Deep Learning-based models are widely used for disease recognition. However, most existing models are highly parameter-intensive, which increases the time required for training and inference. As a result, while lightweight models are more suitable for user-friendly applications, they often show a reduction in performance. To balance performance and model size, we propose CoAtNet-DeepMoE, a Convolution-Attention hybrid architecture for rich feature extraction, further enhanced with a DeepSeek Mixture of Experts to substantially reduce the number of parameters without sacrificing accuracy. We evaluate our model on both balanced and imbalanced datasets from Kaggle and PlantVillage, demonstrating robustness and achieving 99.80% accuracy, 99.80% precision, 99.80% recall, and 99.80% F1-score on Kaggle, and 99.83% accuracy, 99.85% precision, 99.76% recall, and 99.80% F1-score on PlantVillage, representing state-of-the-art performance with only 2.47M parameters. The source code will be available at https://github.com/nadimbrur/CoAt-MoE.

Automated leaf disease classification is critical for early disease detection in resource-constrained field environments. Vision Transformers (ViTs) provide strong representation capability by modeling long-range dependencies and inter-class relationships; however, their high computational cost makes them impractical for deployment on edge devices. As a result, existing approaches struggle to effectively transfer these rich representations to lightweight models. This paper introduces AgriKD, a cross-architecture knowledge distillation framework for efficient edge deployment, which transfers knowledge from a Vision Transformer (ViT) teacher to a compact convolutional student model. To bridge the representational gap between Transformer and CNN architectures, the proposed approach integrates multiple distillation objectives at the output, feature, and relational levels, where each objective captures a different aspect of the teacher knowledge. This enables the student model to better preserve and utilize transformer-derived global representations. Experiments on multiple leaf disease datasets show that the distilled student achieves performance comparable to the teacher while significantly improving efficiency, reducing model parameters by approximately 172 times, computational cost by 47.57 times, and inference latency by 18-22 times. Furthermore, the optimized model is deployed across multiple runtime formats, including ONNX, TFLite Float16, and TensorRT FP16, achieving consistent predictive performance with negligible accuracy degradation. Real-world deployment on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices and a mobile application demonstrates reliable real-time inference, highlighting the practicality of AgriKD for AI-powered agricultural applications in resource-constrained environments.

Early detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and endemic poultry diseases is critical for global food security. While computer vision models excel at classifying diseases from fecal imaging, deploying these systems at scale is bottlenecked by farm data privacy concerns and institutional data silos. Furthermore, existing open-source agricultural datasets frequently suffer from severe, undocumented data contamination. In this paper, we introduce $\textbf{FecalFed}$, a privacy-preserving federated learning framework for poultry disease classification. We first curate and release $\texttt{poultry-fecal-fl}$, a rigorously deduplicated dataset of 8,770 unique images across four disease classes, revealing and eliminating a 46.89$\%$ duplication rate in popular public repositories. To simulate realistic agricultural environments, we evaluate FecalFed under highly heterogeneous, non-IID conditions (Dirichlet $α=0.5$). While isolated single-farm training collapses under this data heterogeneity, yielding only 64.86$\%$ accuracy, our federated approach recovers performance without centralizing sensitive data. Specifically, utilizing server-side adaptive optimization (FedAdam) with a Swin-Small architecture achieves 90.31$\%$ accuracy, closely approaching the centralized upper bound of 95.10%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an edge-optimized Swin-Tiny model maintains highly competitive performance at 89.74$\%$, establishing a highly efficient, privacy-first blueprint for on-farm avian disease monitoring.