Integrating Domain Adaptation and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Saline-Alkali Land Reclamation Planning

Zuguang He, Congcong Zheng, Wanyue Chen, Wenya Zhou, Zaijin Yang +3

Reclamation of saline-alkali land requires management plans that account for soil and water conditions, treatment evidence, and financial constraints. This study develops Wenyao, an agricultural decision-support system integrating domain adaptation with retrieval-augmented generation. A bilingual corpus of 8,664 research papers was processed using a 110-indicator schema to construct SA-Bench, comprising 4,860 paper-level planning instances. A QwQ-32B model was adapted through low-rank supervised fine-tuning and combined with case retrieval for budget-conditioned planning. Evidence extraction achieved an F1-score of 0.83 on 300 expert-annotated papers. Without retrieval, Wenyao achieved 95.83% accuracy on 936 source-disjoint multiple-choice questions, compared with 87.93% for the strongest general-purpose baseline; removing explanatory supervision reduced accuracy to 89.42%. Matched-evidence comparisons across 69 region-budget cases supported complementary contributions from adaptation and retrieval. In a blind assessment by 31 experts, Wenyao with retrieval obtained the highest mean scores for objectives and projected outcomes, whereas GPT-5 scored highest for cost estimates.…