Safety-Aware Cascaded Inference for Crop Damage Assessment with Controlled Error Trade-offs

Analyzing street-view imagery with computer vision models offers a promising approach for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment, but existing approaches typically rely on black-box pre-trained vision models, which lack interpretability and reliability. This study proposes DamageArbiter, a multimodal disagreement-driven arbitration framework designed to improve the accuracy and reliability of street-view-based damage assessment. DamageArbiter leverages the complementary strengths of unimodal and multimodal models and employs a lightweight logistic regression meta-classifier to arbitrate cases in which model predictions disagree. Using 2,556 post-disaster street-view images, paired with manually generated or large language model (LLM)-generated text descriptions, we systematically compared DamageArbiter with fine-tuned unimodal (image-only and text-only) models and CLIP-based multimodal models in terms of classification performance and overconfidence errors. Results show that DamageArbiter improved accuracy to 75.85% and the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) to 0.6188, compared with the best-performing text-only baseline (63.07% accuracy, 0.4126 MCC), image-only baseline (74.33% accuracy, 0.5947 MCC), and CLIP baseline (74.22% accuracy, 0.5915 MCC). The overconfidence analysis further reveals that DamageArbiter substantially reduced the overconfidence error from 70.58% for the best-performing baseline, the image-only ViT model, to 16.45%. Overall, this study demonstrates that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating disaster damage classification models and highlights the importance of measuring overconfidence errors as part of model reliability assessment. DamageArbiter thus offers a more reliable framework for rapid, hyperlocal disaster damage assessment from street-view imagery.

Vision-language models (VLMs) show promise for agricultural classification, but zero-shot performance on disease, pest, damage, quality, and species identification remains poor, and it is unclear whether this reflects weak visual features or a failure to connect them to domain knowledge. We build a benchmark of 116 datasets, 834 classes, and 8,324 images spanning these tasks to isolate where the gap arises. Linear probing shows VLM vision encoders already encode agricultural features nearly as separable as a self-supervised DINOv3 baseline, ruling out weak visual representations as the primary bottleneck. Conditioning each model on an oracle reference description (an upper bound on its parametric knowledge) closes most of the gap left by an unaided lower bound, showing VLMs already know more about agriculture than they show. To close this gap without an oracle description at inference time, we structure test-time reasoning around a fixed, per-task diagnostic rubric: the model generates $K$ candidate responses and a Probabilistic Pivot Tournament (PPT) verifier, scored pairwise against the rubric, selects the best one. This nearly doubles judged F1 over the lower bound and matches or exceeds the upper bound on several tasks, notably pushing Gemma 4 E4B-it's disease F1 to 0.71, above its own upper bound of 0.60. However, the verifier's letter-scale confidence score has the opposite of its intended effect: filtering to its most confident predictions does not improve accuracy and correlates negatively with correctness across every model and pool size tested, so the score cannot serve as a measure of predictive uncertainty, and most of the observed gain likely comes from rubric-grounded generation rather than pairwise verification.

Timely crop-disease identification is critical to food security. Multi-crop recognition suits Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), but conventional soft-routing MoE learns crop assignment freely end-to-end, letting a few experts dominate (expert collapse) with no semantic correspondence to crops, and facing high retraining costs, unstable rejection of non-target inputs, and a saturated accuracy ceiling. We shift the objective from accuracy toward a trade-off among deployment cost, scaling flexibility, and rejection stability, using deterministic hard routing. We propose AdapterMoE: a RouterHead classifies the crop and rejects non-target crops via a Maximum Softmax Probability threshold, with a dual-gate Energy+KNN out-of-distribution module catching distribution-shifted inputs; five per-crop Adapters atop a frozen EfficientNet-B0 backbone discriminate diseases, each calibrated via Temperature Scaling. Because experts are hard-isolated at the data level, the design avoids expert collapse and exposes an add_crop interface for local, per-crop updates instead of full retraining. On PlantVillage (5 crops, 26 classes), across a fair five-system comparison, AdapterMoE attains accuracy statistically indistinguishable from the best baselines (Macro-F1 within a 0.24-point band) while cutting training cost to about 9% of full-network baselines, expanding to a new crop in