<p>Early and accurate detection of plant diseases is vital for global food security and sustainable agriculture. While deep learning offers promising solutions, there is a continuous need for architectures that enhance learning capacity and efficiency. This study introduces ViT-KAN, an innovative hybrid model merging the powerful feature extraction of Vision Transformers (ViT) with the flexible, learnable activation functions of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). By replacing the standard Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classification head of ViT with a KAN module, the proposed architecture aims to better capture nonlinear patterns in agricultural images. Evaluated on the PlantVillage dataset for potato and maize leaf diseases using standard fivefold cross-validation, with final results reported as mean ± standard deviation across the five folds, the model was trained entirely from scratch. ViT-KAN achieved 99.49 ± 0.13% accuracy on the maize dataset and 98.28 ± 0.51% on the potato dataset, compared with 98.92 ± 0.40% and 97.77 ± 0.88%, respectively, for the standard ViT model. Beyond mean accuracy, ViT-KAN showed lower standard deviation across folds, while representative fold curves suggested smoother early training trajectories under the shared training configuration. These findings suggest that ViT-KAN is a promising alternative to conventional ViT-based classification models for plant disease diagnosis.</p>

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Enhancing Vision Transformers with Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks for Plant Leaf Disease Classification

  • Bilal Tekin,
  • Metin Zontul,
  • Kemal Adem

摘要

Early and accurate detection of plant diseases is vital for global food security and sustainable agriculture. While deep learning offers promising solutions, there is a continuous need for architectures that enhance learning capacity and efficiency. This study introduces ViT-KAN, an innovative hybrid model merging the powerful feature extraction of Vision Transformers (ViT) with the flexible, learnable activation functions of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). By replacing the standard Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classification head of ViT with a KAN module, the proposed architecture aims to better capture nonlinear patterns in agricultural images. Evaluated on the PlantVillage dataset for potato and maize leaf diseases using standard fivefold cross-validation, with final results reported as mean ± standard deviation across the five folds, the model was trained entirely from scratch. ViT-KAN achieved 99.49 ± 0.13% accuracy on the maize dataset and 98.28 ± 0.51% on the potato dataset, compared with 98.92 ± 0.40% and 97.77 ± 0.88%, respectively, for the standard ViT model. Beyond mean accuracy, ViT-KAN showed lower standard deviation across folds, while representative fold curves suggested smoother early training trajectories under the shared training configuration. These findings suggest that ViT-KAN is a promising alternative to conventional ViT-based classification models for plant disease diagnosis.