# FireScope: Wildfire Risk Raster Prediction with a Chain-of-Thought Oracle

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17171 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17171/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05905/) (2018)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15660/) (2022)
- [AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22291/) (2025)
- [PhyBench: A Physical Commonsense Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11802/) (2024)
- [R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23493/) (2025)
- [Trade-offs in Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Analysis of Deliberative and Adaptive Reasoning over Foundational Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17979/) (2025)
- [ReasonPix2Pix: Instruction Reasoning Dataset for Advanced Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11190/) (2024)
- [Towards Omnidirectional Reasoning with 360-R1: A Dataset, Benchmark, and GRPO-based Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14197/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Numerical Reasoning in Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14774/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning for Wildfire Danger Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25017/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [OSMDA: OpenStreetMap-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11804/) (2026)
- [B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23500/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting wildfire risk is a reasoning-intensive spatial problem that requires the integration of visual, climatic, and geographic factors to infer continuous risk maps. Existing methods lack the causal reasoning and multimodal understanding required for reliable generalization. We introduce FireScope-Bench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark that couples Sentinel-2 imagery and climate data with expert-defined risk rasters across the USA, and real wildfire events in Europe for cross-continental evaluation. Building on this dataset, we propose FireScope, a VLM-based reasoning-to-generation framework that learns from both reinforcement learning and visual supervision to predict risk rasters with complementary reasoning traces. When trained in the USA and tested in Europe, FireScope achieves substantial performance gains, while expert feedback and automated analysis confirm that its reasoning traces are faithful and semantically meaningful. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning can ground raster prediction models, improving both generalization and interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to (1) demonstrate that language-based reasoning can improve generalization in visual generation, (2) propose a high-resolution wildfire risk model that can be applied across continents, and (3) enable systematic studies of robust cross-continental generalization for multimodal fire risk models. We believe that FireScope-Bench has the potential to serve as a foundation for advancing reasoning-driven, interpretable and generalizable spatial modeling. Data and source code will be made publicly available.