Aiming at many challenges in the recognition task of peach leaf shrink disease, such as the diversity of object size of diseased leaf disease, complex background interference, and inflexible adjustment of model training learning rate, we propose a peach leaf shrink disease recognition algorithm based on an attention generalized efficient layer aggregation network. Firstly, the rectified linear unit activation function is used to effectively improve the stability and performance of the model in low-precision computing environments and solve the problem of partial gradient disappearance. Secondly, the integrated squeeze-and-excitation network attention mechanism can adaptively focus on the key areas of pests and diseases in the image, which significantly enhances the recognition ability of the model to the characteristics of pests and diseases. Finally, combined with fast pyramid pooling enhanced with Local Attention Networks, the deep fusion of cross-layer features is realized to improve the ability of the model to identify complex features and optimize the operation efficiency. The experimental results on the peach leaf shrink disease recognition dataset show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant improvement in performance compared with the original YOLOv8 algorithm. Specifically, mF1, mPrecision, mRecall, and mAP increased by 0.1075, 0.0723, 0.1224, and 0.1184, respectively, which provided strong technical support for intelligent and automatic monitoring of peach pests and diseases.