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
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.
By Anthony Cioppa, Virgile Blua, S\'ebastien Pi\'erard, Pietro Ceccato, Marc Van Droogenbroeck
arXiv:2606. 14963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery.
By Tewodros Syum Gebre, Jagrati Talreja, Leila Hashemi-Beni
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
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.
By Ali Shibli, Andrea Nascetti, Yifang Ban
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...
By Sara Tehrani, Yonghao Xu, Leif Haglund, Amanda Berg, Gulnaz Zhambulova, Michael Felsberg
arXiv:2606. 17403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery.
By Shikha V. Chandel, Yadav Raj Ghimire, Timothy Agboada, Leila Hashemi-Beni
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...
By Fuad Hasan, Chul Min Yeum
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.
By Wenping Yin, Fabian Desuer, Ziqi Liu, Naixia Mou, Weijia Li, Pedram Ghamisi, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Hao Li
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.
By Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang, Jian Song, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Hamish Mitchell, Jiepan Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, Zijie Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiazhen Zhao, Lei Hu, Ting Hu, Hongyan Zhang, Gregory Angelides, Miriam Cha, Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Taylor Perron, Naoto Yokoya
GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.
By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang
arXiv:2609.10356v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-term change understanding from images of the same place revisited over time is a challenging task with applications in map maintenance and urban i...
By Benedetta Liberatori, Nermin Samet, Paolo Rota, Matthieu Cord, Elisa Ricci, Andrei Bursuc, Monika Wysocza\'nska