Rice leaf diseases are critical factors affecting rice yield and quality, and their effective detection is crucial for ensuring stable production. However, existing detection models exhibit limitations in capturing irregular and fine-grained lesion features and are susceptible to interference from complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, this study proposes an Efficient Attention-Guided Network (EAG-YOLOv11n) for rice leaf disease detection. Specifically, an EMA-C3K2 module is proposed to enhance the network’s feature extraction capability. It integrates Efficient Multi-Scale Attention (EMA) into the shallow C3K2 layers, enabling the network to extract richer low-level feature representations. In addition, a Global Local Complementary Attention module (GLC-PSA) is proposed, which integrates a Local Importance Attention (LIA) branch to enhance the local feature representation of the original C2PSA. This design strengthens the perception of lesion regions while effectively suppressing background interference. Furthermore, an Adaptive Threshold Focal Loss (ATFL) is employed to guide the optimization of model parameters during training, alleviating sample imbalance and adaptively emphasizing the learning of challenging samples. Experimental results demonstrate that EAG-YOLOv11n achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 87.3%, representing a 2.7% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, compared with existing mainstream detection methods, including RT-DETR-L, YOLOv7tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9tiny, YOLOv10n, and YOLOv12n, EAG-YOLOv11n improves mAP by 4.2%, 4.3%, 1.9%, 1.1%, 8.7%, and 2.9%, respectively. Overall, these results highlight its superior effectiveness in rice leaf disease detection, providing reliable technical support for stable yield and sustainable agricultural development.