arXiv AI

Decoding the Disaster: Multi-Task Geospatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models and Crowdsourced Imagery for Disaster Mapping

The paper introduces GRDisaster, a multi-task geospatial reasoning framework that leverages vision‑language models to interpret, geolocalize, and assess damage in crowdsourced disaster imagery. It builds on a new benchmark dataset of 26,340 images from PhotoMappers, linking volunteer geographic information, street‑view imagery, and remote sensing data across multiple disaster events from 2018 to 2024. GRDisaster combines deterministic and probabilistic cross‑view geolocalization with multi‑view fusion, and introduces spatial reasoning indicators to validate cross‑view matches and quantify disaster severity using expert‑verified annotations.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response

DisasterInsight is a building‑centric benchmark designed to evaluate vision‑language models (VLMs) for disaster response. Built on the xBD satellite dataset, it adds OpenStreetMap‑derived functional labels to 134,108 building instances and offers 15 task types, including instance assessment, scene counting, multi‑instance reasoning, and structured report generation. Experiments show that VLMs excel at visible damage detection but struggle with building function, multi‑instance reasoning, counting, and grounded reporting, and instruction tuning only partially mitigates these gaps.

By Sara Tehrani, Yonghao Xu, Leif Haglund, Amanda Berg, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Michael Felsberg
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Observing Health Outcomes Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer

The paper introduces the Geo-Context Guided Visual Transformer, a model that augments remote sensing image analysis with geospatial embeddings and an asymmetric attention module. By converting heterogeneous geospatial variables into patch-aligned representations and assigning geospatial roles to attention heads, the approach improves disease prevalence prediction over existing vision-language and graph-based baselines. Ablation and visualization studies demonstrate its effectiveness and interpretability for health-related remote sensing tasks, especially when comprehensive geospatial data are scarce.

By Yu Li, Guilherme N. DeSouza, Praveen Rao, Chi-Ren Shyu
arXiv AI
Jun 18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

arXiv:2606. 18661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios.

By Chengfu Liu, Dongyang Hou, Junwu Xiang, Cheng Yang, Xuezhi Cui, Zeyuan Wang, Liangtian Liu, Zelang Miao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

DamageScope: Vision-Language Retrieval at Scale for Disaster Damage Assessment from Satellite Imagery

DamageScope is a retrieval‑augmented framework that combines satellite imagery, Vision‑Language Models (VLMs), and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate property damage assessment after natural disasters. It uses a Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to extract structured visual representations from satellite images, enabling interactive natural language queries. The system introduces a multi‑vector embedding‑based clustering algorithm that improves scalability and reduces indexing time by up to 14×, and a dual‑store data architecture that cuts LLM API calls, lowering operational cost and response latency by roughly 3×.

By Ravi K. Rajendran, Biplob Debnath, Murugan Sankaradas, Srimat T. Chakradhar
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Obshazard-bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models for Real-Time Disaster Intelligence from Raw Earth Observation Streams

arXiv:2608. 00012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret Earth observation data, yet their capability to support real-world disaster emergency response remains insufficiently evaluated.

By Fengxiang Wang, Qiuyang Yu, Yueying Li, Mingshuo Chen, Chengchi Fei, Kaiyi Xu, Lixin Gu, Wangxu Wei, Junchao Gong, Lipeng Ma, Jiong Wang, Fenghua Ling, Wenlong Zhang, Xue Yang, Wenjing Yang, Ben Fei, Long Lan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Towards reliable multimodal disaster severity assessment through preference optimization and explainable vision-language reasoning

The paper introduces a two‑stage training framework that combines Supervised Fine‑Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve multimodal disaster severity assessment. It creates two datasets—ReasoningSet for validated rationales and PreferenceSet for paired rationales—using a single Human‑in‑the‑Loop workflow. Experiments on InternVL‑3‑8B and LLaVA‑1.5‑7B show that SFT boosts classification accuracy and Macro‑F1, while DPO further enhances interpretability and alignment with human judgment.

By Yuanjun Zhang, Fuzel Ahamed Shaik, Suvojit Acharjee, Fahad Khalid, Mourad Oussalah