Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong progress on vision-language tasks, yet their reliability in safety-critical settings remains underexplored. Fire-smoke understanding is central to public safety and disaster response, but most existing benchmarks lack diverse real-world scenarios and context-aware evaluation. We introduce SAFIRE, a large-scale benchmark for fire-smoke understanding in MLLMs, comprising 83K captioned images from 20 scenarios and 193K multiple-choice VQA (MCVQA) generated from a 9.7K-image subset, spanning 10 evaluation dimensions from basic perception to higher-order reasoning. A GPT-5.4-assisted multi-stage verification pipeline with MLLM majority voting ensures annotation quality. Evaluating ten open-source MLLMs (8B-38B) yields an average accuracy of 61.9%, exposing major gaps in safety-critical reasoning. We further show that adapting vision encoders with only 7% of our domain-specific data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%, indicating that carefully curated data can yield substantial gains even when data volume is limited. All datasets, models, and code are available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.

Large language models (LLMs) show great performance in various tasks, but face deployment challenges from limited memory capacity and bandwidth.Low-bit weight quantization can save memory and accelerate inference.Although floating-point (FP) formats show good performance in LLM quantization, they tend to perform poorly with small group sizes or sub-4 bits.We find the reason is that the absence of asymmetry in previous FP quantization makes it unsuitable for handling asymmetric value distribution of LLM weight tensors.In this work, we propose asymmetric FP quantization (AFPQ), which sets separate scales for positive and negative values.Our method leads to large accuracy improvements and can be easily plugged into other quantization methods, including GPTQ and AWQ, for better performance.Besides, no additional storage is needed compared with asymmetric integer (INT) quantization.The code is available at https://github.com/zhangsichengsjtu/AFPQ.