The paper introduces a simulation‑grounded vision‑language model (VLM) framework for wildfire monitoring that converts 2D wildfire simulations into labeled video episodes using a fixed Blender mapping to create low‑detail 3D proxies. These proxies, along with controllable video generation, provide a multimodal memory that a training‑free multi‑agent VLM system uses to retrieve reference episodes, reconcile visual and memory‑based predictions, and generate structured wildfire reports. The system achieves 77.3% accuracy on six simulator‑derived report fields, outperforming direct VLM querying and text‑only memory baselines.
By Duowen Chen, Yuchen Sun, Zhiqi Li, Yuxuan Liao, Sinan Wang, Bart van Bloemen Waanders, Bo Zhu
WildfireSpreadBench evaluates machine‑learning models for predicting next‑day wildfire spread, comparing five discriminative and one generative architecture on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset. The study shows that model rankings differ markedly when using Average Precision versus threshold‑dependent metrics such as F1 and IoU, revealing three distinct prediction profiles—over‑predicting, balanced, and under‑predicting—that AP alone cannot distinguish. Expanding input channels modestly affected AP, underscoring that AP may favor models with predictions poorly suited for operational use.
By Arin Gopakumar, Marco Pannozzo
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
The paper introduces an AI surrogate modelling framework that accelerates wildfire hazard mapping across Canada. By training a multi‑task deep learning model on national‑scale data, the surrogate reproduces key outputs of the computationally intensive BurnP3+ simulator—burn probability, mean fire intensity, and mean rate of spread—in seconds instead of days or weeks. The framework includes standardized training, fine‑tuning, and evaluation protocols, domain‑specific metrics, and counterfactual evaluation to ensure robust out‑of‑distribution performance, achieving up to 806‑fold CPU speed‑up and 13% memory usage compared to the original simulator.
By Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo, Chirag Goel, Jana Osea, Aldo Zaimi, Tom Swystun, Sandy Erni, Francisco Emiliano Lopez Saavedra, Yan Boulanger, Ga\'etan Marceau Caron
arXiv:2607. 07951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wildfire smoke events produce extreme PM$_{2.
By Yongcan Huang, Li Jiang, Ze Yu Liu
Annual Earth‑observation embeddings, specifically Tessera, can encode wildfire disturbance signals well enough to map burned areas without needing curated fire‑specific imagery or dense time‑series analysis. In tests, linear models using a single Tessera embedding matched or outperformed paired pre‑ and post‑fire HLS imagery and post‑fire imagery alone, achieving high F1 scores for burn‑scar delineation and regional mapping. The approach successfully mapped all same‑year fires in benchmark scenes, recovered 97% of California burned area without California training data, transferred to European fires with high accuracy, and even estimated ignition timing within a 13‑day error margin.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that pre‑trained annual embeddings can simplify and scale burned‑area mapping, reducing reliance on dense time‑series data and enabling more efficient wildfire monitoring."
By Jovana Knezevic, Clement Atzberger, Zhengpeng Feng, Adam F. A. Pellegrini, Srinivasan Keshav, David Coomes