Social networks can be a valuable source of information during crisis events. In particular, users can post a stream of multimodal data that can be critical for real-time humanitarian response. However, effectively extracting meaningful information from this large and noisy data stream and effectively integrating heterogeneous data remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we explore vision language models (VLMs) and advanced fusion strategies to enhance the classification of crisis data in three different tasks. We incorporate LLaVA-generated text to improve text-image alignment. Additionally, we leverage Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based vision and text embeddings, which, without task-specific fine-tuning, outperform traditional models. To further refine multimodal fusion, we employ Guided Cross Attention (Guided CA) and combine it with the Differential Attention mechanism to enhance feature alignment by emphasizing critical information while filtering out irrelevant content. Our results show that while Differential Attention improves classification performance, Guided CA remains highly effective in aligning multimodal features. Extensive experiments on the CrisisMMD benchmark data set demonstrate that the combination of pretrained VLMs, enriched textual descriptions, and adaptive fusion strategies consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models in classification accuracy, contributing to more reliable and interpretable models for three different tasks that are crucial for disaster response. Our code is available at https://github.com/Munia03/Multimodal_Crisis_Event.
Cloud contamination significantly impairs the usability of optical satellite imagery, affecting critical applications such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, and land-use analysis. This research presents a Cloud-Attentive Reconstruction Framework that integrates SAR-optical feature fusion with deep learning-based image reconstruction to generate cloud-free optical imagery. The proposed framework employs an attention-driven feature fusion mechanism to align complementary structural information from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) with spectral characteristics from optical data. Furthermore, a cloud-aware model update strategy introduces adaptive loss weighting to prioritize cloud-occluded regions, enhancing reconstruction accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches, achieving a PSNR of 31.01 dB, SSIM of 0.918, and MAE of 0.017. These outcomes highlight the framework's effectiveness in producing high-fidelity, spatially and spectrally consistent cloud-free optical images.
Operations in disaster response, search \& rescue, and military missions that involve multiple agents demand automated processes to support the planning of the courses of action (COA). Moreover, traverse-affecting changes in the environment (rain, snow, blockades, etc.) may impact the expected performance of a COA, making it desirable to have a pool of COAs that are diverse in task distributions across agents. Further, variations in agent capabilities, which could be human crews and/or autonomous systems, present practical opportunities and computational challenges to the planning process. This paper presents a new theoretical formulation and computational framework to generate such diverse pools of COAs for operations with soft variations in agent-task compatibility. Key to the problem formulation is a graph abstraction of the task space and the pool of COAs itself to quantify its diversity. Formulating the COAs as a centralized multi-robot task allocation problem, a genetic algorithm is used for (order-ignoring) allocations of tasks to each agent that jointly maximize diversity within the COA pool and overall compatibility of the agent-task mappings. A graph neural network is trained using a policy gradient approach to then perform single agent task sequencing in each COA, which maximizes completion rates adaptive to task features. Our tests of the COA generation process in a simulated environment demonstrate significant performance gain over a random walk baseline, small optimality gap in task sequencing, and execution time of about 50 minutes to plan up to 20 COAs for 5 agent/100 task operations.
Agentic UAVs represent a new frontier in autonomous aerial intelligence, integrating perception, decision-making, memory, and collaborative planning to operate adaptively in complex, real-world environments. Driven by recent advances in Agentic AI, these systems surpass traditional UAVs by exhibiting goal-driven behavior, contextual reasoning, and interactive autonomy. We provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the architectural components and enabling technologies that distinguish Agentic UAVs from traditional autonomous UAVs. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis highlights advancements in autonomy with AI agents, learning, and mission flexibility. This study explores seven high-impact application domains precision agriculture, construction & mining, disaster response, environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, logistics, security, and wildlife conservation, illustrating the broad societal value of agentic aerial intelligence. Furthermore, we identify key challenges in technical constraints, regulatory limitations, and data-model reliability, and we present emerging solutions across hardware innovation, learning architectures, and human-AI interaction. Finally, a future roadmap is proposed, outlining pathways toward self-evolving aerial ecosystems, system-level collaboration, and sustainable, equitable deployments. This survey establishes a foundational framework for the future development, deployment, and governance of agentic aerial systems (Agentic UAVs) across diverse societal and industrial domains.
Natural disasters have caused significant losses to human society, and the timely and efficient acquisition of post-disaster environmental information is crucial for the effective implementation of rescue operations. Due to the complexity of post-disaster environments, existing sensing technologies face challenges such as weak environmental adaptability, insufficient specialized sensing capabilities, and limited practicality of sensing solutions. This paper explores the heterogeneous multi-agent online autonomous collaborative scheduling algorithm HoAs-PALN, aimed at achieving efficient collection of post-disaster environmental information. HoAs-PALN is realized through adaptive dimensionality reduction in the matching process and local Nash equilibrium game, facilitating autonomous collaboration among time-dependent UAVs, workers and vehicles to enhance sensing scheduling. (1) In terms of adaptive dimensionality reduction during the matching process, HoAs-PALN significantly reduces scheduling decision time by transforming a five-dimensional matching process into two categories of three-dimensional matching processes; (2) Regarding the local Nash equilibrium game, HoAs-PALN combines the softmax function to optimize behavior selection probabilities and introduces a local Nash equilibrium determination mechanism to ensure scheduling decision performance. Finally, we conducted detailed experiments based on extensive real-world and simulated data. Compared with the baselines (GREEDY, K-WTA, MADL and MARL), HoAs-PALN improves task completion rates by 64.12%, 46.48%, 16.55%, and 14.03% on average, respectively, while each online scheduling decision takes less than 10 seconds, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic post-disaster environments.
Classifying geospatial imagery remains a major bottleneck for applications such as disaster response and land-use monitoring-particularly in regions where annotated data is scarce or unavailable. Existing tools (e.g., RS-CLIP) that claim zero-shot classification capabilities for satellite imagery nonetheless rely on task-specific pretraining and adaptation to reach competitive performance. We introduce GeoVision Labeler (GVL), a strictly zero-shot classification framework: a vision Large Language Model (vLLM) generates rich, human-readable image descriptions, which are then mapped to user-defined classes by a conventional Large Language Model (LLM). This modular, and interpretable pipeline enables flexible image classification for a large range of use cases. We evaluated GVL across three benchmarks-SpaceNet v7, UC Merced, and RESISC45. It achieves up to 93.2% zero-shot accuracy on the binary Buildings vs. No Buildings task on SpaceNet v7. For complex multi-class classification tasks (UC Merced, RESISC45), we implemented a recursive LLM-driven clustering to form meta-classes at successive depths, followed by hierarchical classification-first resolving coarse groups, then finer distinctions-to deliver competitive zero-shot performance. GVL is open-sourced at https://github.com/microsoft/geo-vision-labeler to catalyze adoption in real-world geospatial workflows.
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into autonomous agents that cooperate across organizational boundaries, enabling joint disaster response, supply-chain optimization, and other tasks that demand decentralized expertise without surrendering data ownership. Yet, cross-domain collaboration shatters the unified trust assumptions behind current alignment and containment techniques. An agent benign in isolation may, when receiving messages from an untrusted peer, leak secrets or violate policy, producing risks driven by emergent multi-agent dynamics rather than classical software bugs. This position paper maps the security agenda for cross-domain multi-agent LLM systems. We introduce seven categories of novel security challenges, for each of which we also present plausible attacks, security evaluation metrics, and future research guidelines.
Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) are increasingly deployed as autonomous swarms in search-and-rescue and other disaster-response scenarios. In these settings, they use computer vision (CV) to detect objects of interest and autonomously adapt their missions. However, traditional CV systems often struggle to recognize unfamiliar objects in open-world environments or to infer their relevance for mission planning. To address this, we incorporate large language models (LLMs) to reason about detected objects and their implications. While LLMs can offer valuable insights, they are also prone to hallucinations and may produce incorrect, misleading, or unsafe recommendations. To ensure safe and sensible decision-making under uncertainty, high-level decisions must be governed by cognitive guardrails. This article presents the design, simulation, and real-world integration of these guardrails for sUAS swarms in search-and-rescue missions.
Path planning is a fundamental capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), enabling them to efficiently navigate toward a target region or explore complex environments while avoiding obstacles. Traditional pathplanning methods, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have proven effective but often encounter significant challenges. These include high search space complexity, suboptimal path quality, and slow convergence, issues that are particularly problematic in high-stakes applications like disaster response, where rapid and efficient planning is critical. To address these limitations and enhance path-planning efficiency, we propose Vision Language Model RRT (VLM-RRT), a hybrid approach that integrates the pattern recognition capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) with the path-planning strengths of RRT. By leveraging VLMs to provide initial directional guidance based on environmental snapshots, our method biases sampling toward regions more likely to contain feasible paths, significantly improving sampling efficiency and path quality. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments with various state-of-the-art VLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach.
Detecting vehicles in satellite images is crucial for traffic management, urban planning, and disaster response. However, current models struggle with real-world diversity, particularly across different regions. This challenge is amplified by geographic bias in existing datasets, which often focus on specific areas and overlook regions like the Middle East. To address this gap, we present the Vehicles in the Middle East (VME) dataset, designed explicitly for vehicle detection in high-resolution satellite images from Middle Eastern countries. Sourced from Maxar, the VME dataset spans 54 cities across 12 countries, comprising over 4,000 image tiles and more than 100,000 vehicles, annotated using both manual and semi-automated methods. Additionally, we introduce the largest benchmark dataset for Car Detection in Satellite Imagery (CDSI), combining images from multiple sources to enhance global car detection. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on existing datasets perform poorly on Middle Eastern images, while the VME dataset significantly improves detection accuracy in this region. Moreover, state-of-the-art models trained on CDSI achieve substantial improvements in global car detection.
With the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, there is a necessity for advanced technologies that can provide reliable situational awareness and communication. Conventional systems are often inadequate due to unreliable infrastructure, power grid failures, high investment costs and scalability challenges. This paper explores the potential of ad-hoc mesh joint radar and communication (JRC) networks as a scalable, resilient, energy-efficient solution for disaster management that can operate independently of conventional infrastructure. The proposed JRC network enhances disaster response by integrating target detection (such as identifying vital signs, hazardous leaks, and fires) with communication capabilities to ensure efficient information dissemination under intense clutter conditions. Key performance metrics, including data rate, Signal-to-Clutter and Noise Ratio (SCNR), probability of detection, and false alarm rate, are used to assess performance. An optimization approach is proposed to provide an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme. The results show the performance of ad-hoc mesh JRC systems, underscoring their potential to enhance disaster management efforts by addressing unique operational challenges.
Massive and diverse web data are increasingly vital for government disaster response, as demonstrated by the 2022 floods in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This study examines how X (formerly Twitter) and public inquiry submissions provide insights into public behaviour during crises. We analyse more than 55,000 flood-related tweets and 1,450 submissions to identify behavioural patterns during extreme weather events. While social media posts are short and fragmented, inquiry submissions are detailed, multi-page documents offering structured insights. Our methodology integrates Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance semantic understanding. LDA reveals distinct opinions and geographic patterns, while LLMs improve filtering by identifying flood-relevant tweets using public submissions as a reference. This Relevance Index method reduces noise and prioritizes actionable content, improving situational awareness for emergency responders. By combining these complementary data streams, our approach introduces a novel AI-driven method to refine crisis-related social media content, improve real-time disaster response, and inform long-term resilience planning.
Earth observation foundation models have shown strong generalization across multiple Earth observation tasks, but their robustness under real-world perturbations remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce REOBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models across six tasks and twelve types of image corruptions, including both appearance-based and geometric perturbations. To ensure realistic and fine-grained evaluation, our benchmark focuses on high-resolution optical remote sensing images, which are widely used in critical applications such as urban planning and disaster response. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a broad range of models trained using masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and vision-language pre-training paradigms. Our results reveal that (1) existing Earth observation foundation models experience significant performance degradation when exposed to input corruptions. (2) The severity of degradation varies across tasks, model architectures, backbone sizes, and types of corruption, with performance drop varying from less than 1% to over 20%. (3) Vision-language models show enhanced robustness, particularly in multimodal tasks. REOBench underscores the vulnerability of current Earth observation foundation models to real-world corruptions and provides actionable insights for developing more robust and reliable models.
AI systems in high-consequence domains such as defense, intelligence, and disaster response must detect rare, high-impact events while operating under tight resource constraints. Traditional annotation strategies that prioritize label volume over informational value introduce redundancy and noise, limiting model generalization. This paper introduces smart-sizing, a training data strategy that emphasizes label diversity, model-guided selection, and marginal utility-based stopping. We implement this through Adaptive Label Optimization (ALO), combining pre-labeling triage, annotator disagreement analysis, and iterative feedback to prioritize labels that meaningfully improve model performance. Experiments show that models trained on 20 to 40 percent of curated data can match or exceed full-data baselines, particularly in rare-class recall and edge-case generalization. We also demonstrate how latent labeling errors embedded in training and validation sets can distort evaluation, underscoring the need for embedded audit tools and performance-aware governance. Smart-sizing reframes annotation as a feedback-driven process aligned with mission outcomes, enabling more robust models with fewer labels and supporting efficient AI development pipelines for frontier models and operational systems.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is vital for applications such as disaster response, logistics delivery, and urban inspection. However, existing methods often struggle with insufficient multimodal fusion, weak generalization, and poor interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose FlightGPT, a novel UAV VLN framework built upon Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with powerful multimodal perception capabilities. We design a two-stage training pipeline: first, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using high-quality demonstrations to improve initialization and structured reasoning; then, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, guided by a composite reward that considers goal accuracy, reasoning quality, and format compliance, to enhance generalization and adaptability. Furthermore, FlightGPT introduces a Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based reasoning mechanism to improve decision interpretability. Extensive experiments on the city-scale dataset CityNav demonstrate that FlightGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scenarios, with a 9.22\% higher success rate than the strongest baseline in unseen environments. Our implementation is publicly available.
Wildfires have become increasingly frequent, irregular, and severe in recent years. Understanding how affected populations perceive and respond during wildfire crises is critical for timely and empathetic disaster response. Social media platforms offer a crowd-sourced channel to capture evolving public discourse, providing hyperlocal information and insight into public sentiment. This study analyzes Reddit discourse during the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, spanning from the onset of the disaster to full containment. We collect 385 posts and 114,879 comments related to the Palisades and Eaton fires. We adopt topic modeling methods to identify the latent topics, enhanced by large language models (LLMs) and human-in-the-loop (HITL) refinement. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical framework to categorize latent topics, consisting of two main categories, Situational Awareness (SA) and Crisis Narratives (CN). The volume of SA category closely aligns with real-world fire progressions, peaking within the first 2-5 days as the fires reach the maximum extent. The most frequent co-occurring category set of public health and safety, loss and damage, and emergency resources expands on a wide range of health-related latent topics, including environmental health, occupational health, and one health. Grief signals and mental health risks consistently accounted for 60 percentage and 40 percentage of CN instances, respectively, with the highest total volume occurring at night. This study contributes the first annotated social media dataset on the 2025 LA fires, and introduces a scalable multi-layer framework that leverages topic modeling for crisis discourse analysis. By identifying persistent public health concerns, our results can inform more empathetic and adaptive strategies for disaster response, public health communication, and future research in comparable climate-related disaster events.
Terahertz (THz) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks with flexible topologies and ultra-high data rates are expected to empower numerous applications in security surveillance, disaster response, and environmental monitoring, among others. However, the dynamic topologies hinder the efficient long-term joint power and antenna array resource allocation for THz links among UAVs. Furthermore, the continuous nature of power and the discrete nature of antennas cause this joint resource allocation problem to be a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem with non-convexity and NP-hardness. Inspired by recent rapid advancements in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), a graph neural network (GNN) aided DRL algorithm for resource allocation in the dynamic THz UAV network with an emphasis on self-node features (GLOVE) is proposed in this paper, with the aim of resource efficiency (RE) maximization. When training the allocation policy for each UAV, GLOVE learns the relationship between this UAV and its neighboring UAVs via GNN, while also emphasizing the important self-node features of this UAV. In addition, a multi-task structure is leveraged by GLOVE to cooperatively train resource allocation decisions for the power and sub-arrays of all UAVs. Experimental results illustrate that GLOVE outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of the highest RE and the lowest latency. Moreover, unlike the benchmark methods with severe packet loss, GLOVE maintains zero packet loss during the entire training process, demonstrating its better robustness under the highly dynamic THz UAV network.
Accurate building damage assessment using bi-temporal multi-modal remote sensing images is essential for effective disaster response and recovery planning. This study proposes a novel Building-Guided Pseudo-Label Learning Framework to address the challenges of mapping building damage from pre-disaster optical and post-disaster SAR images. First, we train a series of building extraction models using pre-disaster optical images and building labels. To enhance building segmentation, we employ multi-model fusion and test-time augmentation strategies to generate pseudo-probabilities, followed by a low-uncertainty pseudo-label training method for further refinement. Next, a change detection model is trained on bi-temporal cross-modal images and damaged building labels. To improve damage classification accuracy, we introduce a building-guided low-uncertainty pseudo-label refinement strategy, which leverages building priors from the previous step to guide pseudo-label generation for damaged buildings, reducing uncertainty and enhancing reliability. Experimental results on the 2025 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieved the highest mIoU score (54.28%) and secured first place in the competition.
In crisis management and remote sensing, image segmentation plays a crucial role, enabling tasks like disaster response and emergency planning by analyzing visual data. Neural networks are able to analyze satellite acquisitions and determine which areas were affected by a catastrophic event. The problem in their development in this context is the data scarcity and the lack of extensive benchmark datasets, limiting the capabilities of training large neural network models. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology, namely Magnifier, to improve segmentation performance with limited data availability. The Magnifier methodology is applicable to any existing encoder-decoder architecture, as it extends a model by merging information at different contextual levels through a dual-encoder approach: a local and global encoder. Magnifier analyzes the input data twice using the dual-encoder approach. In particular, the local and global encoders extract information from the same input at different granularities. This allows Magnifier to extract more information than the other approaches given the same set of input images. Magnifier improves the quality of the results of +2.65% on average IoU while leading to a restrained increase in terms of the number of trainable parameters compared to the original model. We evaluated our proposed approach with state-of-the-art burned area segmentation models, demonstrating, on average, comparable or better performances in less than half of the GFLOPs.
Natural disasters increasingly threaten communities worldwide, creating an urgent need for rapid, reliable building damage assessment to guide emergency response and recovery efforts. Current methods typically classify damage in binary (damaged/undamaged) or ordinal severity terms, limiting their practical utility. In fact, the determination of damage typology is crucial for response and recovery efforts. To address this important gap, this paper introduces DamageCAT, a novel framework that provides typology-based categorical damage descriptions rather than simple severity ratings. Accordingly, this study presents two key contributions: (1) the BD-TypoSAT dataset containing satellite image triplets (pre-disaster, post-disaster, and damage masks) from Hurricane Ida with four damage categories (partial roof damage, total roof damage, partial structural collapse, and total structural collapse), and (2) a hierarchical U-Net-based transformer architecture that effectively processes pre-post disaster image pairs to identify and categorize building damage. Despite significant class imbalances in the training data, our model achieved robust performance with overall metrics of 0.7921 Intersection over Union (IoU) and 0.8835 F1 scores across all categories. The model's capability to recognize intricate damage typology in less common categories is especially remarkable. The DamageCAT framework advances automated damage assessment by providing actionable, typological information that better supports disaster response decision-making and resource allocation compared to traditional severity-based approaches.