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Neuro-symbolic AI for rice disease diagnosis with calibrated attention and rule-aware explanations

Singh, Chatter, Singh, Amar and Dhelim, Sahraoui orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3620-1395 (2026) Neuro-symbolic AI for rice disease diagnosis with calibrated attention and rule-aware explanations. Information Processing in Agriculture . ISSN 2214-3173

Abstract
Accurate and trustworthy disease diagnosis from field imagery requires a framework that balances predictive accuracy with calibrated confidence and auditable reasoning. This work benchmarks a diagnostic system coupling an attention-augmented convolutional network (ResNet-34+CBAM) with post-hoc probability calibration and a rule-aware validator. Agronomic symptom rules are encoded in a lightweight RDF/OWL knowledge graph, enabling a post-hoc check that links model predictions to human-readable explanations for auditability. On a rigorously de-duplicated test split of the public PaddyDoctor corpus, the model achieves 95.13 accuracy (weighted F1: 95.14) with a median latency of 4.6 ms. We analyze the trade-offs of post-hoc calibration: Temperature Scaling, fit on the calibration split (ECE: 1.65→1.35), improves the test-set Brier score (0.0760→0.0758) and NLL (0.1573→0.1566) but results in a slight increase in test-set ECE (0.82→0.94). A robustness analysis using common corruptions identifies critical failure modes: while resilient to JPEG compression (86.15 accuracy at severity 5), the model is highly vulnerable to brightness shifts (47.72) and Gaussian blur (32.13), highlighting the need for domain-specific augmentations. The resulting system provides a comprehensive baseline for combining strong predictive performance with post-hoc calibration and auditable explanations, supporting transparent triage in practical deployments.
Metadata
Item Type:Article (Published)
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Post-hoc explainability, Rice disease diagnosis, Calibrated confidence, CBAM attention, Temperature scaling, Grad-CAM, RDF/OWL rules, Uncertainty and robustness
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Computer engineering
Computer Science > Image processing
Computer Science > Machine learning
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Publisher:Elsevier
Official URL:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/...
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:32440
Deposited On:20 Mar 2026 14:49 by Sahraoui Dhelim . Last Modified 20 Mar 2026 14:49
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