Zihui Ma
Author directory2026
Empowering LLM Agents with Geospatial Awareness: Toward Grounded Reasoning for Wildfire Response
Yiheng Chen | Lingyao Li | Zihui Ma | Qikai Hu | Yilun Zhu | Min Deng | Runlong Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yiheng Chen | Lingyao Li | Zihui Ma | Qikai Hu | Yilun Zhu | Min Deng | Runlong Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Effective disaster response is essential for safeguarding lives and property. Existing statistical approaches often lack semantic context, generalize poorly across events, and offer limited interpretability. While large language models (LLMs) provide few-shot generalization, they remain text-bound and blind to geography. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Geospatial Awareness Layer (GAL) that grounds LLM agents in structured Earth data. Starting from raw wildfire detections, GAL automatically retrieves and integrates infrastructure, demographic, terrain, and weather information from external geodatabases, assembling them into a concise, unit-annotated perception script. This enriched context enables agents to produce evidence-based resource-allocation recommendations (e.g., personnel assignments and budget allocations), further reinforced by historical analogs and daily change signals for incremental updates. We evaluate the framework in real wildfire scenarios across multiple LLM models, showing that geospatially grounded agents can outperform baselines. The proposed framework can generalize to other hazards such as floods and hurricanes.
2025
LLMs as World Models: Data-Driven and Human-Centered Pre-Event Simulation for Disaster Impact Assessment
Lingyao Li | Dawei Li | Zhenhui Ou | Xiaoran Xu | Jingxiao Liu | Zihui Ma | Runlong Yu | Min Deng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Lingyao Li | Dawei Li | Zhenhui Ou | Xiaoran Xu | Jingxiao Liu | Zihui Ma | Runlong Yu | Min Deng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Efficient simulation is essential for enhancing proactive preparedness for sudden-onset disasters such as earthquakes. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) as world models show promise in simulating complex scenarios. This study examines multiple LLMs to proactively estimate perceived earthquake impacts. Leveraging multimodal datasets including geospatial, socioeconomic, building, and street-level imagery data, our framework generates Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) predictions at zip code and county scales. Evaluations on the 2014 Napa and 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes using USGS “Did You Feel It? (DYFI)” reports demonstrate significant alignment, as evidenced by high correlation of 0.88 and low RMSE of 0.77 as compared to real reports at the zip code level. Techniques such as RAG and ICL can improve simulation performance, while visual inputs notably enhance accuracy compared to structured numerical data alone. These findings show the promise of LLMs in simulating disaster impacts that can help strengthen pre-event planning.