Karri, Viswanada Chakravarthy2025-07-152025-07-152025-0630p.http://hdl.handle.net/10263/7566Dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Ujjwal BhattacharyaEffective pest identification and management are essential for ensuring agricultural productivity, especially in regions with limited expert access. This work proposes a virtual assistant based on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) [1] framework to support pest management tasks. The system utilizes a multimodal dataset consisting of pest images and annotated textual interactions, adapted from the AgriLLaVA corpus [2]. The assistant combines retrieval mechanisms with generative language models to generate contextually grounded responses. It is designed for deployment on local hardware with limited computational resources, integrating open-source models for both retrieval and generation. Preliminary results suggest that this approach can provide accurate, scalable, and interpretable support for field-level pest diagnostics.enPest managementRetrieval-Augmented GenerationMultimodal datasetLanguage modelsAgricultural support systemsScalable AIPlant disease identificationOpen-source modelsOther