AgriPath: A Systematic Exploration of Architectural Trade-offs for Crop Disease Classification

Reliable crop disease detection requires models that perform consistently across diverse acquisition conditions, yet existing evaluations often focus on single architectural families or lab-generated datasets. This work presents a systematic empirical comparison of three model paradigms for fine-grained crop disease classification: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), contrastive Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and generative VLMs. To enable controlled analysis of domain effects, we introduce AgriPath-LF16, a benchmark of 111k images spanning 16 crops and 41 diseases with explicit separation between laboratory and field imagery, alongside a balanced 30k subset for standardised training and evaluation. We train and evaluate all models under unified protocols across full, lab-only, and field-only training regimes using macro-F1 and Parse Success Rate (PSR) to account for generative reliability (i.e., output parsability measured via PSR). The results reveal distinct performance profiles: CNNs achieve the highest accuracy on in-domain imagery but exhibit pronounced degradation under domain shift; contrastive VLMs provide a robust and parameter-efficient alternative with competitive cross-domain performance; generative VLMs demonstrate the strongest resilience to distributional variation, albeit with additional failure modes stemming from free-text generation. These findings highlight that architectural choice should be guided by deployment context rather than aggregate performance alone.