# Explainable vision transformer enabled convolutional neural network for plant disease identification: PlantXViT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.07919 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07919/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03169/) (2016)
- [An open access repository of images on plant health to enable the development of mobile disease diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08060/) (2015)
- [Towards Learning Convolutions from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13657/) (2020)
- [The Plant Pathology 2020 challenge dataset to classify foliar disease of apples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11958/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Explainable Model-Agnostic Similarity and Confidence in Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13735/) (2022)
- [Augment to Segment: Tackling Pixel-Level Imbalance in Wheat Disease and Pest Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09961/) (2025)
- [A comprehensive review on Plant Leaf Disease detection using Deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14087/) (2023)
- [Advancing site-specific disease and pest management in precision agriculture: From reasoning-driven foundation models to adaptive, feedback-based learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24650/) (2025)
- [XAI and Few-shot-based Hybrid Classification Model for Plant Leaf Disease Prognosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06676/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Plant diseases are the primary cause of crop losses globally, with an impact on the world economy. To deal with these issues, smart agriculture solutions are evolving that combine the Internet of Things and machine learning for early disease detection and control. Many such systems use vision-based machine learning methods for real-time disease detection and diagnosis. With the advancement in deep learning techniques, new methods have emerged that employ convolutional neural networks for plant disease detection and identification. Another trend in vision-based deep learning is the use of vision transformers, which have proved to be powerful models for classification and other problems. However, vision transformers have rarely been investigated for plant pathology applications. In this study, a Vision Transformer enabled Convolutional Neural Network model called "PlantXViT" is proposed for plant disease identification. The proposed model combines the capabilities of traditional convolutional neural networks with the Vision Transformers to efficiently identify a large number of plant diseases for several crops. The proposed model has a lightweight structure with only 0.8 million trainable parameters, which makes it suitable for IoT-based smart agriculture services. The performance of PlantXViT is evaluated on five publicly available datasets. The proposed PlantXViT network performs better than five state-of-the-art methods on all five datasets. The average accuracy for recognising plant diseases is shown to exceed 93.55%, 92.59%, and 98.33% on Apple, Maize, and Rice datasets, respectively, even under challenging background conditions. The efficiency in terms of explainability of the proposed model is evaluated using gradient-weighted class activation maps and Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanation.