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Vineet Singh

Publications and source records attributed to Vineet Singh.

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Configurable Multi-Stage Vision Pipeline for Crop Disease and Pest Diagnosis

Farmer.Chat is Digital Green's farm advisory service for smallholder farmers. When something looks wrong with a crop, the farmer takes a photograph and sends it, and that photograph is the whole question: no symptom described, no crop named, often no text at all. The service has to determine whether the picture can be used, what crop it shows, and what is wrong with it, from images taken on cheap phones in a field, in poor light and with a moving camera. The system doing this today cannot be adjusted. It has no adjustable thresholds for photograph rejection, crops and problems cannot be added, and there is no confidence cut-off to set. We study about 1.16 million photographs sent to Farmer.Chat from Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Nigeria. The production quality gate rejected 46.8% of the images it judged, over a quarter of those reaching diagnosis returned no crop name, and 35.8% of the labelled problems filed under "disease" are pests, identifiable without the crop. We therefore split the work into three stages: a quality gate (M0), a crop detector (M1), and a disease or pest detector (M2). Route A fills all three with one fine-tuned vision-language model (Qwen3-VL-4B) answering in a single call. Route B fills each with a small specialist model (DaViT, YOLO26). We replace our production GPT-4o quality gate with a small MobileNetV3 gate at 86.9% F1 in 12 ms. On one test set scored the same way for every system, a hierarchical DaViT-Base achieves 95.41% crop accuracy against 91.46% for the production baseline. It also leads on diagnosis and never declines to answer, while every language model in the comparison leaves a large share of rows with no diagnosis. The fine-tuned model retains two capabilities the specialists do not have: one call for all three stages, and a request for a better photograph when the image cannot support an answer.

cs.CV

Model-Agnostic and Language-Agnostic Voice Pipeline Improvement for the Agriculture Domain

FarmerChat is Digital Green's AI-powered agricultural advisory assistant for smallholder farmers, who access it in their own language through text, voice, or photographs. Voice is a critical channel for this population, yet field-recorded speech is challenging for general-purpose automatic speech recognition (ASR) because recordings frequently contain machinery noise, background media, competing speakers, and domain-specific agricultural vocabulary. These conditions disproportionately affect crop, pest, chemical, and quantity terms that carry the meaning of a farmer's query. We present a modular, model-agnostic pipeline for improving ASR quality in FarmerChat without fine-tuning or replacing the underlying ASR model. The pipeline combines gated audio enhancement, speaker diarization and target-speaker selection, ASR, domain-aware correction using a weighted agricultural lexicon, and a quality gate for detecting unreliable transcripts. Only the diarization stage is fine-tuned; all other stages use off-the-shelf models behind common interfaces. We evaluate the pipeline on human-annotated FarmerChat recordings in Hindi, Telugu, and Odia using word error rate (WER) and a domain-weighted error rate that gives greater importance to agricultural terminology. The largest improvements occur on multi-speaker recordings, where target-speaker selection prevents competing speech from entering the transcript. Across the full corpus, the pipeline reduces WER by 16-23% relative on three cloud ASR models and by 5% on an on-device model. On multi-speaker recordings, the reductions are 32-42% for the cloud models and 16% for the on-device model. All reported reductions are statistically significant. These results show that targeted preprocessing, speaker selection, and domain-aware post-processing can substantially improve agricultural speech transcription while preserving the underlying ASR model.

eess.AS

Fine-Tuning and Evaluating Conversational AI for Agricultural Advisory

Large Language Models show promise for agricultural advisory, yet vanilla models exhibit unsupported recommendations, generic advice lacking specific, actionable detail, and communication styles misaligned with smallholder farmer needs. In high stakes agricultural contexts, where recommendation accuracy has direct consequences for farmer outcomes, these limitations pose challenges for responsible deployment. We present a hybrid LLM architecture that decouples factual retrieval from conversational delivery: supervised fine-tuning with LoRA on expert-curated GOLDEN FACTS (atomic, verified units of agricultural knowledge) optimizes fact recall, while a separate stitching layer transforms retrieved facts into culturally appropriate, safety-aware responses. Our evaluation framework, DG-EVAL, performs atomic fact verification (measuring recall, precision, and contradiction detection) against expert-curated ground truth rather than Wikipedia or retrieved documents. Experiments across multiple model configurations on crops and queries from Bihar, India show that fine-tuning on curated data substantially improves fact recall and F1, while maintaining high relevance. Using a fine-tuned smaller model achieves comparable or better factual quality at a fraction of the cost of frontier models. A stitching layer further improves safety subscores while maintaining high conversational quality. We release the farmerchat-prompts library to enable reproducible development of domain-specific agricultural AI.

cs.CL

Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition for Indian Languages in Agricultural Contexts

The digitization of agricultural advisory services in India requires robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems capable of accurately transcribing domain-specific terminology in multiple Indian languages. This paper presents a benchmarking framework for evaluating ASR performance in agricultural contexts across Hindi, Telugu, and Odia languages. We introduce evaluation metrics including Agriculture Weighted Word Error Rate (AWWER) and domain-specific utility scoring to complement traditional metrics. Our evaluation of 10,934 audio recordings, each transcribed by up to 10 ASR models, reveals performance variations across languages and models, with Hindi achieving the best overall performance (WER: 16.2%) while Odia presents the greatest challenges (best WER: 35.1%, achieved only with speaker diarization). We characterize audio quality challenges inherent to real-world agricultural field recordings and demonstrate that speaker diarization with best-speaker selection can substantially reduce WER for multi-speaker recordings (upto 66% depending on the proportion of multi-speaker audio). We identify recurring error patterns in agricultural terminology and provide practical recommendations for improving ASR systems in low-resource agricultural domains. The study establishes baseline benchmarks for future agricultural ASR development.

eess.AS

Farmer.Chat: Scaling AI-Powered Agricultural Services for Smallholder Farmers

Small and medium-sized agricultural holders face challenges like limited access to localized, timely information, impacting productivity and sustainability. Traditional extension services, which rely on in-person agents, struggle with scalability and timely delivery, especially in remote areas. We introduce FarmerChat, a generative AI-powered chatbot designed to address these issues. Leveraging Generative AI, FarmerChat offers personalized, reliable, and contextually relevant advice, overcoming limitations of previous chatbots in deterministic dialogue flows, language support, and unstructured data processing. Deployed in four countries, FarmerChat has engaged over 15,000 farmers and answered over 300,000 queries. This paper highlights how FarmerChat's innovative use of GenAI enhances agricultural service scalability and effectiveness. Our evaluation, combining quantitative analysis and qualitative insights, highlights FarmerChat's effectiveness in improving farming practices, enhancing trust, response quality, and user engagement.

cs.ET

Workload Similarity Analysis using Machine Learning Techniques

Finding the similarity between two workload behaviors is helpful in 1. creating proxy workloads 2. characterizing an unknown workload's behavior by matching its behavior against known workloads. In this article, we propose a method to measure the similarity between two workloads using machine learning-based analysis of the performance telemetry data collected for the execution runs of the two workloads. We also demonstrate the accuracy of the technique by measuring the similarity between a variety of know benchmark workloads.

cs.PF