Interpretable Citrus Fruit Quality Assessment Using Vision Transformers and Lightweight Large Language Models

This study introduces an interpretable deep learning pipeline for citrus fruit quality classification using the ViT-Base model vit_base_patch16_224 and Microsoft’s Phi-3-mini LLM. The ViT model, fine-tuned on resized 224 × 224 images with ImageNet weights, classifies fruits into good, damaged, and rotten categories, achieving 98.29% accuracy. For interpretability, Grad-CAM highlights damaged regions, while the Phi-3-mini generates human-readable diagnostic reports. The system runs efficiently on edge devices, enabling real-time, on-site quality assessment. This approach enhances transparency and decision-making, showing strong potential for deployment in the citrus industry.