Obshazard-bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models for Real-Time Disaster Intelligence from Raw Earth Observation Streams
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Obshazard-bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Foundation Models for Real-Time Disaster Intelligence from Raw Earth Observation Streams
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret Earth observation data, yet their capability to support real-world disaster emergency response remains insufficiently evaluated. Existing remote sensing benchmarks largely rely on static, post-hoc, and expert-processed products, such as gridded reanalysis data, which are difficult to align with operational disaster scenarios where hazards evolve rapidly and decisions must be made under strict time constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce Obshazard-bench, a real-time, observation-driven benchmark for evaluating disaster intelligence in MLLMs. Unlike image-centric or post-event benchmarks, Obshazard-bench directly integrates raw, high-frequency satellite sounding streams from diverse satellite sensors with concurrent ground-station observations, historical disaster records, and socio-economic indicators, bypassing delayed expert-processing and physical-inversion pipelines. The benchmark covers 8 major disaster categories and 28 sub-categories across more than 60 countries, incorporating over 120 historically documented extreme-event cases and thousands of lifecycle-oriented VQA samples. Moreover, Obshazard-bench further defines a three-stage evaluation taxonomy aligned with the operational disaster workflow: Predictive Crisis Anticipation for pre-disaster risk detection and early forecasting, Active Evolution Reasoning for in-situ disaster tracking and termination prediction, and Multi-faceted Impact Quantification for post-disaster magnitude deduction, humanitarian burden estimation, and socio-economic impact assessment. Experiments on representative general-purpose and Earth-focused foundation models reveal substantial limitations in transforming raw multi-channel physical observations into temporally grounded and decision-relevant disaster reasoning.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.00012 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.00012v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.00012
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
Current browse context:
References & Citations
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Recipes for Steering and Scaling LLMs via Sampling
Aug 28
-
Can a Model Catch Its Own Hallucinations for Free?: Label-Free Doubt Signals Hold Their Own Against a Labelled Dataset for Abstention
Aug 28
-
FIRSTPASS: A Multi-Domain, Multi-Round Peer Review Dataset Grounded in Real Editorial Outcomes
Aug 28
-
Interpretable, Fairly Evaluated Automated L2 Speaking Assessment that Beats the Single-Human Ceiling and Why Pause Encoding Does Not Change LLM Fluency Scores
Aug 28
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.