# LeafNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark for Foundational Vision-Language Understanding of Plant Diseases

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agricultural vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 34 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Agricultural vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/agricultural-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Using Deep Learning for Image-Based Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03169/) (2016)
- [BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18803/) (2023)
- [PlantDoc: A Dataset for Visual Plant Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10317/) (2019)
- [On the Power of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16327/) (2022)
- [PhenoBench -- A Large Dataset and Benchmarks for Semantic Image Interpretation in the Agricultural Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04557/) (2023)
- [AgroGPT: Efficient Agricultural Vision-Language Model with Expert Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08405/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Data Integration for Oncology in the Era of Deep Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06471/) (2023)
- [AgroBench: Vision-Language Model Benchmark in Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20519/) (2025)
- [A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset and Model for Crop Disease Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06973/) (2025)
- [PlantSeg: A Large-Scale In-the-wild Dataset for Plant Disease Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04038/) (2024)
- [Agri-LLaVA: Knowledge-Infused Large Multimodal Assistant on Agricultural Pests and Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02158/) (2024)

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

- [From UAV Imagery to Agronomic Reasoning: A Multimodal LLM Benchmark for Plant Phenotyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09907/) (2026)
- [TomaMMU: A Comprehensive Multimodal Understanding Benchmark for Tomato Leaf Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08727/) (2026)
- [AppleScab-LT: A Longitudinal Real-Field Apple Scab Dataset for Temporal Disease Progression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14235/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Modal Generative Model for Tomato Disease Leaves Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19555/) (2026)
- [AgroGround: Multi-Granularity Grounded Recognition in Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04425/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have significantly advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of visual and linguistic data. However, their application in domain-specific agricultural tasks, such as plant pathology, remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, comprehensive multimodal image--text datasets and benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce LeafNet, a comprehensive multimodal dataset, and LeafBench, a visual question-answering benchmark developed to systematically evaluate the capabilities of VLMs in understanding plant diseases. The dataset comprises 186,000 leaf digital images spanning 97 disease classes, paired with metadata, generating 13,950 question-answer pairs spanning six critical agricultural tasks. The questions assess various aspects of plant pathology understanding, including visual symptom recognition, taxonomic relationships, and diagnostic reasoning. Benchmarking 12 state-of-the-art VLMs on our LeafBench dataset, we reveal substantial disparity in their disease understanding capabilities. Our study shows performance varies markedly across tasks: binary healthy--diseased classification exceeds 90% accuracy, while fine-grained pathogen and species identification remains below 65%. Direct comparison between vision-only models and VLMs demonstrates the critical advantage of multimodal architectures: fine-tuned VLMs outperform traditional vision models, confirming that integrating linguistic representations significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These findings highlight critical gaps in current VLMs for plant pathology applications and underscore the need for LeafBench as a rigorous framework for methodological advancement and progress evaluation toward reliable AI-assisted plant disease diagnosis. Code is available at https://github.com/EnalisUs/LeafBench.