Vision Language Models for Primary Structure Threat Identification in Wildland Urban Interface Fires

arXiv:2611.10377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wildland urban interface (WUI) fires increasingly threaten communities and infrastructure, motivating the need for rapid visual assessment. Recent research has focused primarily on detecting fire and assessing post-event damage. However, structure-level fire threat identification during active WUI fire events remains underexplored. This study evaluates Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct for this active-fire decision using two separately scored tracks: 1,824 synthetic images from 491 designed WUI scenarios and 45 frames from a controlled-burn experiment conducted in collaboration with Columbus Fire & EMS Department. Under zero-shot prompting, the model returned valid target fields for 1,808 synthetic images and 39 controlled-burn frames. Accuracy among valid outputs was 94.0% for the synthetic track and 69.2% for the controlled-burn track, compared with a 16.0% random-selection baseline for the latter. On the synthetic track, the model generally identified the intended target across varied designed WUI scenarios when the relevant fire-spread cues were visually distinct. Controlled-burn performance was well above random selection, but errors showed difficulty interpreting spatial relations in complex scenes. The dual-track protocol provides scalable stress testing in designed scenarios and a controlled-burn reference for assessing model behavior under physical fire conditions. Future work can use the synthetic data for VLM post-training and then evaluate the adapted models on larger and more diverse real WUI fire datasets.