# Think First, Assign Next (ThiFAN-VQA): A Two-stage Chain-of-Thought Framework for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 38 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07333/) (2020)
- [FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02951/) (2020)
- [Verify-and-Edit: A Knowledge-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03268/) (2023)
- [In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09881/) (2023)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [RescueNet: A High Resolution UAV Semantic Segmentation Benchmark Dataset for Natural Disaster Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12361/) (2022)
- [From Easy to Hard: Learning Language-guided Curriculum for Visual Question Answering on Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03147/) (2022)
- [Thinking Before Looking: Improving Multimodal LLM Reasoning via Mitigating Visual Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12591/) (2024)
- [Building Disaster Damage Assessment in Satellite Imagery with Multi-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05525/) (2020)
- [BDANet: Multiscale Convolutional Neural Network with Cross-directional Attention for Building Damage Assessment from Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07364/) (2021)
- [Visual question answering: from early developments to recent advances -- a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03939/) (2025)
- [VQA-Aid: Visual Question Answering for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10548/) (2021)
- [RSCC: A Large-Scale Remote Sensing Change Caption Dataset for Disaster Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01907/) (2025)
- [Learning to Retrieve Iteratively for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14739/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Instruct-ICL: Instruction-Guided In-Context Learning for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11439/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Timely and accurate assessment of damages following natural disasters is essential for effective emergency response and recovery. Recent AI-based frameworks have been developed to analyze large volumes of aerial imagery collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, providing actionable insights rapidly. However, creating and annotating data for training these models is costly and time-consuming, resulting in datasets that are limited in size and diversity. Furthermore, most existing approaches rely on traditional classification-based frameworks with fixed answer spaces, restricting their ability to provide new information without additional data collection or model retraining. Using pre-trained generative models built on in-context learning (ICL) allows for flexible and open-ended answer spaces. However, these models often generate hallucinated outputs or produce generic responses that lack domain-specific relevance. To address these limitations, we propose ThiFAN-VQA, a two-stage reasoning-based framework for visual question answering (VQA) in disaster scenarios. ThiFAN-VQA first generates structured reasoning traces using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and ICL to enable interpretable reasoning under limited supervision. A subsequent answer selection module evaluates the generated responses and assigns the most coherent and contextually accurate answer, effectively improve the model performance. By integrating a custom information retrieval system, domain-specific prompting, and reasoning-guided answer selection, ThiFAN-VQA bridges the gap between zero-shot and supervised methods, combining flexibility with consistency. Experiments on FloodNet and RescueNet-VQA, UAV-based datasets from flood- and hurricane-affected regions, demonstrate that ThiFAN-VQA achieves superior accuracy, interpretability, and adaptability for real-world post-disaster damage assessment tasks.