Agro-Consensus: Semantic Self-Consistency in Vision-Language Models for Crop Disease Management in Developing Countries

Agricultural disease management in developing countries such as India, Kenya, and Nigeria faces significant challenges due to limited access to expert plant pathologists, unreliable internet connectivity, and cost constraints that hinder the deployment of large-scale AI systems. This work introduces a cost-effective self-consistency framework to improve vision-language model (VLM) reliability for agricultural image captioning. The proposed method employs semantic clustering, using a lightweight (80MB) pre-trained embedding model to group multiple candidate responses. It then selects the most coherent caption -- containing a diagnosis, symptoms, analysis, treatment, and prevention recommendations -- through a cosine similarity-based consensus. A practical human-in-the-loop (HITL) component is incorporated, wherein user confirmation of the crop type filters erroneous generations, ensuring higher-quality input for the consensus mechanism. Applied to the publicly available PlantVillage dataset using a fine-tuned 3B-parameter PaliGemma model, our framework demonstrates improvements over standard decoding methods. Evaluated on 800 crop disease images with up to 21 generations per image, our single-cluster consensus method achieves a peak accuracy of 83.1% with 10 candidate generations, compared to the 77.5% baseline accuracy of greedy decoding. The framework's effectiveness is further demonstrated when considering multiple clusters; accuracy rises to 94.0% when a correct response is found within any of the top four candidate clusters, outperforming the 88.5% achieved by a top-4 selection from the baseline.