A knowledge-driven unified framework for plant disease classification and severity grading via domain adaptation

Plant leaf disease classification and severity grading are essential for precision agriculture, enabling timely intervention and optimized management. Existing models often fail to recognize previously unseen disease categories due to rigid label spaces and limited representation of plant phenotypes. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven unified framework for plant disease classification and severity grading. A Common Knowledge Learner consolidates fundamental features of plant species, disease categories, and severity levels from labeled data, forming a transferable representation space. It employs a multi-level contrastive learning strategy to capture both global semantic representations and fine-grained lesion patterns. Building on these representations, a Cross-Domain Adaptation module leverages a teacher–student framework with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) bridges in-domain and out-of-domain feature spaces using large-scale unlabeled data. Meanwhile, a contrastive feature library enables similarity-based reasoning and supports flexible label space expansion during inference without retraining. We evaluate our approach on Leaf-CG, a large-scale dataset comprising 441,448 images from 59 plant species, 373 disease categories, and four severity levels. Experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing baselines, achieving 94.9% disease classification accuracy and 90.6% severity grading accuracy in-domain. Under out-of-domain conditions, the method achieves 82.1% true positive rate (TPR) in open-set settings, highlighting its strong generalization ability and potential for practical plant disease management. Code and dataset are available at https://www.uniplantcg.samlab.cn.