# Clustering-Guided Multi-Layer Contrastive Representation Learning for Citrus Disease Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11171/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [An open access repository of images on plant health to enable the development of mobile disease diagnostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08060/) (2015)
- [Cluster Contrast for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11568/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Image Translation using Adversarial Networks for Improved Plant Disease Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11915/) (2019)
- [AutoEmbedder: A semi-supervised DNN embedding system for clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05830/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Citrus, as one of the most economically important fruit crops globally, suffers severe yield depressions due to various diseases. Accurate disease detection and classification serve as critical prerequisites for implementing targeted control measures. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning-based computer vision algorithms, have substantially decreased time and labor requirements while maintaining the accuracy of detection and classification. Nevertheless, these methods predominantly rely on massive, high-quality annotated training examples to attain promising performance. By introducing two key designs: contrasting with cluster centroids and a multi-layer contrastive training (MCT) paradigm, this paper proposes a novel clustering-guided self-supervised multi-layer contrastive representation learning (CMCRL) algorithm. The proposed method demonstrates several advantages over existing counterparts: (1) optimizing with massive unannotated samples; (2) effective adaptation to the symptom similarity across distinct citrus diseases; (3) hierarchical feature representation learning. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public citrus image set CDD, outperforming existing methods by 4.5%-30.1% accuracy. Remarkably, our method narrows the performance gap with fully supervised counterparts (all samples are labeled). Beyond classification accuracy, our method shows great performance on other evaluation metrics (F1 score, precision, and recall), highlighting the robustness against the class imbalance challenge.