# GeBDA: Building Damage Assessment as Text-Based Sequence Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28567/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [PaliGemma 2: A Family of Versatile VLMs for Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03555/) (2024)
- [EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16822/) (2024)
- [xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09296/) (2019)
- [ChangeMamba: Remote Sensing Change Detection With Spatiotemporal State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03425/) (2024)
- [SkyEyeGPT: Unifying Remote Sensing Vision-Language Tasks via Instruction Tuning with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09712/) (2024)
- [PSALM: Pixelwise SegmentAtion with Large Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14598/) (2024)
- [EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15190/) (2024)
- [Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12798/) (2025)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [GEOBench-VLM: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Geospatial Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19325/) (2024)
- [BRIGHT: A globally distributed multimodal building damage assessment dataset with very-high-resolution for all-weather disaster response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06019/) (2025)
- [DisasterM3: A Remote Sensing Vision-Language Dataset for Disaster Damage Assessment and Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21089/) (2025)
- [CHOICE: Benchmarking the Remote Sensing Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18145/) (2024)
- [Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19294/) (2025)
- [RescueADI: Adaptive Disaster Interpretation in Remote Sensing Images with Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13384/) (2024)
- [SegEarth-R2: Towards Comprehensive Language-guided Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20013/) (2025)
- [DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18493/) (2026)
- [From Pixels to Semantics: A Multi-Stage AI Framework for Structural Damage Detection in Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22768/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventionally, Building Damage Assessment (BDA) is tackled either with dedicated network architectures or by fine-tuning geospatial image foundation models. In this work, we ask whether a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) can localize buildings and grade their damage through autoregressive sequence generation alone. We cast BDA as predicting a variable-length set of bounding boxes, each specified by its coordinates and a damage label. Our preliminary implementation, based on the open Gemma model, achieves promising damage mapping results from only bi-temporal satellite images and a suitable text prompt.