arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

DisasterBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for UAV-Based Disaster Response in Complex Environments

arXiv:2606. 06217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a disaster unfolds, responders must answer not only what is happening, but also why it is happening, what will happen next, and what to do now, often from noisy low-altitude UAV views and under tight on-site compute constraints.

By Tan Zhang, Quanyou Li, Lu Zhang, Jun Liu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Ping Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SafeSceneReason: A Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark Connecting Industrial Hazards with Accident Knowledge

arXiv:2608. 09230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial-safety understanding requires more than detecting workers, equipment, and personal protective equipment.

By Yuanchi Zhu, Kang An, Tengyue Wang, Zhongyu Yang, Chenxu Du, Xinqi Yang, Hebao Zhu, Bokai Zhao, Tianyu Liang, Ziliang Wang, Faqiang Qian, Yunli Yang, Weiyang Shi, Qibing Ren
arXiv AI
Oct 2

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.

By Wenping Yin, Fabian Desuer, Ziqi Liu, Naixia Mou, Weijia Li, Pedram Ghamisi, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Hao Li
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Learning to Reason About Implicit Multimodal Harm: From Diagnosis to Generalization

The paper introduces MuPHI, a diagnostic benchmark that isolates multimodal harm arising solely from image‑text composition, providing benign counterfactuals and annotated harm rationales. Evaluation with MuPHI shows that vision‑language models can ground individual modalities but struggle to bind evidence into a coherent harm mechanism, and that existing harm detection methods transfer poorly to new harm distributions. To address this, the authors propose Compositional Harm Interpretation Learning (CHIL), which rewards evidence identification, cross‑modal binding, and verdict consistency, leading to significant improvements in out‑of‑distribution transfer and counterfactual robustness.

By Anisha Saha, Varsha Suresh, Teodora Kamova, Sophia Wiedmann, Timothy Hospedales, Vera Demberg
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

DisasterRoute: Evidence-Guided Dual-System Routing for Visual Disaster Question Answering

DisasterRoute introduces a dual-system routing framework for visual disaster question answering that balances fast direct decisions with selective step-by-step reasoning. The system first uses Disaster-S1, a vision‑language model trained for option discrimination, to produce a quick answer. If the model’s confidence is low or evidence suggests uncertainty, the framework routes the query to DisasterVL, a more comprehensive reasoning model, thereby improving accuracy while maintaining low latency.

By Tan Zhang, Xing Deng, Lu Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhu, Ping Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 1

SafeAtlas-VL: Beyond Binary Multimodal Safety with Large-Scale Data and Guard Models

SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.

By Zongrui Wang, Xiangyang Zhu, Sicheng Wang, Han Wang, Dingyi Rong, Zeyu Zhang, Chunyi Li, Yue Shi, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Yan Teng, Wei Sun, Ning Liu, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Sep 10

SAFIRE: Safety-Critical Benchmark for Fine-grained Fire and Smoke Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

SAFIRE is a large-scale benchmark for fire and smoke understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), featuring 83,000 captioned images across 20 scenarios and 193,000 multiple-choice VQA questions derived from a 9.7K-image subset. The benchmark evaluates 10 dimensions of performance, from basic perception to higher-order reasoning, and employs a GPT‑5.4-assisted verification pipeline to ensure annotation quality. Experiments on ten open-source MLLMs (8B–38B) reveal an average accuracy of 61.9%, highlighting significant gaps in safety-critical reasoning, while fine-tuning vision encoders on just 7% of SAFIRE data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%. All resources are publicly available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.

By Pengfei Li, Naufal Suryanto, Sicheng Zhang, Mohammad Alsharid, Muzammal Naseer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

OncoReason: Structuring Clinical Reasoning in LLMs for Robust and Interpretable Survival Prediction

arXiv:2510. 17532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting cancer treatment outcomes requires models that are both accurate and interpretable, particularly in the presence of heterogeneous clinical data.

By Raghu Vamshi Hemadri, Geetha Krishna Guruju, Kristi Topollai, Anna Ewa Choromanska
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 21

CAViAR: A Causal Video Dataset for Fine-Grained Accident Reasoning in Real-World Scenarios

arXiv:2608. 19380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While modern autonomous driving systems excel at perception tasks such as object detection and trajectory prediction, they lack the high-level causal reasoning required to interpret traffic accidents.

By Sparsh Garg, Yi-Wen Chen, Vijay Kumar B G, Abhishek Aich
arXiv AI
Sep 1

PermitGPT: A Unified Generative-AI Pipeline for Construction Hazard Forecasting, Permit Prediction, and Community Impact

PermitGPT is a generative‑AI framework that transforms unstructured construction permit descriptions into structured outputs for safety hazard identification, permit requirement specification, and community impact assessment. It aligns data from the NYC Department of Buildings, OSHA, and NYC 311 to create 90,000 prompt‑response pairs, fine‑tunes three open‑weight language models, and evaluates them on 2,833 test cases, reporting complementary performance across inference speed, lexical overlap, and semantic alignment. The study presents an initial AI‑assisted approach to construction governance and outlines future evaluation and validation directions.

By Mohd Ruhul Ameen, Farjana Aktar, Akif Islam, Momen Khandoker Ope, Abu Saleh Musa Miah, Jungpil Shin