Paper Detail
Mohamed Farag, Genc Hoxha, Yahia Maleki, Chris McCool, Ribana Roscher
Reliable decision-support in digital agriculture requires accurate predictions and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, particularly for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. Ensemble methods provide strong uncertainty quantification, but their computational and memory demands limit practical use, while single-model approximations often trade off uncertainty quality for efficiency. We propose ST-LoRA, a parameter-efficient ensemble framework that builds diverse ensemble members from a single training trajectory by combining Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with snapshot ensembling. Each member shares a frozen pretrained backbone and differs only in lightweight low-rank adapters, reducing trainable parameters to under 10% of the full model while preserving ensemble diversity. We evaluate across two agricultural datasets - GrowliFlower-L (cauliflower, open field) and BUP20 (sweet pepper, glasshouse) - using SegFormer and Mask2Former, covering in-distribution performance, calibration under distribution shift, and out-of-distribution detection. Ablations show feed-forward layers, not attention layers, are the critical LoRA target for dense prediction, contrary to the attention-only convention from language models. ST-LoRA matches or exceeds full-rank ensembles in segmentation accuracy and calibration across both datasets and architectures, while substantially reducing training time, inference latency, memory footprint, and storage requirements. Against efficient baselines - Snapshot Ensemble, MC Dropout, and Deep Deterministic Uncertainty - ST-LoRA consistently matches or outperforms them in image/pixel-level OoD detection, calibration stability under shift, and cross-seed variance, with far fewer parameters and lower compute. These results show LoRA-efficient ensemble adaptation is a highly effective, practical approach for uncertainty-aware agricultural vision systems.
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@article{farag2026st,
title = {ST-LoRA: Single Trajectory LoRA Ensemble for Uncertainty Aware Agricultural Segmentation},
author = {Mohamed Farag and Genc Hoxha and Yahia Maleki and Chris McCool and Ribana Roscher},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Reliable decision-support in digital agriculture requires accurate predictions and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, particularly for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. Ensemble methods provide strong uncertainty quantification, but their computational and memory demands limit practical use, while single-model approximations often trade off uncertainty quality for efficiency. We propose ST-LoRA, a parameter-efficient ensemble framework that builds diverse ensemble members},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01530},
keywords = {cs.CV},
eprint = {2608.01530},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}