# Robust Disaster Assessment from Aerial Imagery Using Text-to-Image Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13779 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13779/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08466/) (2023)
- [BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10816/) (2023)
- [LayoutDiffusion: Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17189/) (2023)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02951/) (2020)
- [StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00984/) (2023)
- [Fake it till you make it: Learning transferable representations from synthetic ImageNet clones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08420/) (2022)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00050/) (2022)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14303/) (2023)
- [OpenEarthMap: A Benchmark Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10732/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Disaster Management: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06932/) (2025)
- [CC-Pan: Channel-wise Compression based Diffusion for Efficient Pan-Sharpening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04473/) (2026)
- [A Lightweight LLM Framework for Disaster Humanitarian Information Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12284/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Driven Scale and Spatial Selection for Efficient Cross-Modal Alignment in Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30244/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a simple and efficient method to leverage emerging text-to-image generative models in creating large-scale synthetic supervision for the task of damage assessment from aerial images. While significant recent advances have resulted in improved techniques for damage assessment using aerial or satellite imagery, they still suffer from poor robustness to domains where manual labeled data is unavailable, directly impacting post-disaster humanitarian assistance in such under-resourced geographies. Our contribution towards improving domain robustness in this scenario is two-fold. Firstly, we leverage the text-guided mask-based image editing capabilities of generative models and build an efficient and easily scalable pipeline to generate thousands of post-disaster images from low-resource domains. Secondly, we propose a simple two-stage training approach to train robust models while using manual supervision from different source domains along with the generated synthetic target domain data. We validate the strength of our proposed framework under cross-geography domain transfer setting from xBD and SKAI images in both single-source and multi-source settings, achieving significant improvements over a source-only baseline in each case.