A Simulation-Grounded Agentic VLM Framework for Wildfire Monitoring and Reporting

arXiv:2610.02451 · cs.CV, cs.GR · Submitted 2026-10-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.GR

Submitted: 2026-10-01

Updated: 2026-10-01

Code: https://github.com/mitrefireline/simfire

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Effective wildfire monitoring requires relating visual evidence to physical fire dynamics, yet real videos with synchronized physical annotations are scarce and high-fidelity 3D simulation is costly.

Abstract

Effective wildfire monitoring requires relating visual evidence to physical fire dynamics, yet real videos with synchronized physical annotations are scarce and high-fidelity 3D simulation is costly. We present a simulation-grounded vision-language model (VLM) framework that automatically converts 2D wildfire simulations into labeled video episodes. A fixed Blender mapping produces low-detail 3D proxies aligned with simulator terrain, fuel layout, fire activity, and wind cues; controllable video generation supplies richer appearance. The proxies are intermediate representations rather than finely rendered final scenes. Generated videos and simulator labels form reusable multimodal memory for a training-free multi-agent VLM system that retrieves reference episodes, reconciles visual and memory-based predictions, and produces structured wildfire reports. On held-out generated episodes, video memory achieves 51.5% exact four-tag accuracy, compared with 22.6% for direct VLM querying and 16-17% for text-only memory; the complete system achieves 77.3% accuracy on six simulator-derived report fields. Component ablations, cross-generator tests, and three real-UAV evaluations assess retrieval, reporting, generator changes, and observable monitoring tasks. The framework connects automatic simulation-to-proxy conversion with memory-based VLM reasoning under scarce real-world physical annotations.

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