The impact of fine-tuning paradigms on unknown plant diseases recognition

Abstract

Plant diseases pose significant threats to agriculture, impacting both food safety and public health. Traditional plant disease detection systems are typically limited to recognizing disease categories included in the training dataset, rendering them ineffective against new disease types. Although out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods have been proposed to address this issue, the impact of fine-tuning paradigms on these methods has been overlooked. This paper focuses on studying the impact of fine-tuning paradigms on the performance of detecting unknown plant diseases. Currently, fine-tuning on visual tasks is mainly divided into visual-based models and visual-language-based models. We first discuss the limitations of large-scale visual language models in this task: textual prompts are difficult to design. To avoid the side effects of textual prompts, we futher explore the effectiveness of purely visual pre-trained models for OOD detection in plant disease tasks. Specifically, we employed five publicly accessible datasets to establish benchmarks for open-set recognition, OOD detection, and few-shot learning in plant disease recognition. Additionally, we comprehensively compared various OOD detection methods, fine-tuning paradigms, and factors affecting OOD detection performance, such as sample quantity. The results show that visual prompt tuning outperforms fully fine-tuning and linear probe tuning in out-of-distribution detection performance, especially in the few-shot scenarios. Notably, the max-logit-based on visual prompt tuning achieves an AUROC score of 94.8 $$\%$$ in the 8-shot setting, which is nearly comparable to the method of fully fine-tuning on the full dataset (95.2 $$\%$$ ), which implies that an appropriate fine-tuning paradigm can directly improve OOD detection performance. Finally, we visualized the prediction distributions of different OOD detection methods and discussed the selection of thresholds. Overall, this work lays the foundation for unknown plant disease recognition, providing strong support for the security and reliability of plant disease recognition systems. We will release our code at https://github.com/JiuqingDong/PDOOD to further advance this field.