The study investigates shortcut learning in geospatial foundation model embeddings for cross-disaster damage assessment. By holding out entire disasters during evaluation, the authors demonstrate a significant drop in mean balanced accuracy across multiple datasets, revealing that models rely on event or scene characteristics rather than transferable evidence. They further show that simple feature-level transformations, such as supervised contrastive learning or PCA, can improve generalization to unseen disasters.
arXiv:2606. 17403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery.
The paper revisits building damage assessment (BDA) from satellite imagery, emphasizing the need for a sensor‑agnostic, instance‑based task definition that can handle missing pre‑event data. It reviews existing datasets by modality, timing, and geography, critiques current single‑score evaluation practices, and proposes a more robust, ranking‑based multi‑score protocol. The authors also survey deep learning methods, highlight challenges in generalizing to new events and regions, and outline how these insights could shape future BDA challenges and data‑sharing practices.
arXiv:2608.20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Disaster damage is spatial: buildings rarely fail in isolation. Yet using spatial context for damage classification remains surprisingly underexplore...
arXiv:2607. 22746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed.
arXiv:2606. 14963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery.
arXiv:2606. 10329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As one of the most destructive natural disasters, earthquakes have struck many countries around the world in recent years, causing serious economic losses.
arXiv:2607. 16050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pluvial (rainfall-driven) flooding accounts for 45% of National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) claims in the United States and is harder to predict than its riverine and coastal counterparts, with existing approaches limited to coarse resolution, regional domains, or computationally intensive process-based models unsuitable for daily continental-scale use.
arXiv:2601.18493v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-ce...
Timely, high-resolution maps of flood extent around settlements are essential for emergency response and damage assessment. We consider airborne RGB imagery for flood mapping as it can be collected rapidly at low cost.
arXiv:2608. 09325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Newly triggered landslides rarely carry immediate annotations, so cross-domain transferability determines the value of landslide mapping for emergency response and regional risk assessment.
Newly triggered landslides rarely carry immediate annotations, so cross-domain transferability determines the value of landslide mapping for emergency response and regional risk assessment. Vision foundation models have strengthened representational transfer, yet on unseen regions, events, and data sources they still generate high-confidence false alarms.
arXiv:2608.30858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Off-road navigation can fail when physical structures induce irrecoverable states such as high-centering or entrapment, requiring human interventions...