Agri-R1: Agricultural Reasoning for Disease Diagnosis via Automated-Synthesis and Reinforcement Learning

Agricultural disease diagnosis challenges VLMs, as conventional fine-tuning requires extensive labels, lacks interpretability, and generalizes poorly. While reasoning improves model robustness, existing methods rely on costly expert annotations and rarely address the open-ended, diverse nature of agricultural queries. To address these limitations, we propose Agri-R1, a reasoning-enhanced large model for agriculture. Our framework automates high-quality reasoning data generation via vision-language synthesis and LLM-based filtering, using only 19% of available samples. Training employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel reward function that integrates domain-specific lexicons and fuzzy matching to assess both correctness and linguistic flexibility in open-ended responses. Evaluated on CDDMBench, our resulting 3B-parameter model achieves performance competitive with 7B- to 13B-parameter baselines, showing a +27.9% relative gain in disease recognition accuracy, +33.3% in agricultural knowledge QA, and a +26.10-point improvement in cross-domain generalization over standard fine-tuning. These results suggest that automated reasoning synthesis paired with domain-aware reward design may provide a broadly applicable paradigm for RL-based VLM adaptation in data-scarce specialized domains. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/CPJ-Agricultural/Agri-R1.