Automated urban waterlogging assessment and early warning through a mixture of foundation models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Chenxu, Huang, Fuxiang, Zhang, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Chenxu
Huang, Fuxiang
Zhang, Lei
author_facet Zhang, Chenxu
Huang, Fuxiang
Zhang, Lei
contents With climate change intensifying, urban waterlogging poses an increasingly severe threat to global public safety and infrastructure. However, existing monitoring approaches rely heavily on manual reporting and fail to provide timely and comprehensive assessments. In this study, we present Urban Waterlogging Assessment (UWAssess), a foundation model-driven framework that automatically identifies waterlogged areas in surveillance images and generates structured assessment reports. To address the scarcity of labeled data, we design a semi-supervised fine-tuning strategy and a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting strategy to unleash the potential of the foundation model for data-scarce downstream tasks. Evaluations on challenging visual benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements in perception performance. GPT-based evaluations confirm the ability of UWAssess to generate reliable textual reports that accurately describe waterlogging extent, depth, risk and impact. This dual capability enables a shift of waterlogging monitoring from perception to generation, while the collaborative framework of multiple foundation models lays the groundwork for intelligent and scalable systems, supporting urban management, disaster response and climate resilience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated urban waterlogging assessment and early warning through a mixture of foundation models
Zhang, Chenxu
Huang, Fuxiang
Zhang, Lei
Artificial Intelligence
With climate change intensifying, urban waterlogging poses an increasingly severe threat to global public safety and infrastructure. However, existing monitoring approaches rely heavily on manual reporting and fail to provide timely and comprehensive assessments. In this study, we present Urban Waterlogging Assessment (UWAssess), a foundation model-driven framework that automatically identifies waterlogged areas in surveillance images and generates structured assessment reports. To address the scarcity of labeled data, we design a semi-supervised fine-tuning strategy and a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting strategy to unleash the potential of the foundation model for data-scarce downstream tasks. Evaluations on challenging visual benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements in perception performance. GPT-based evaluations confirm the ability of UWAssess to generate reliable textual reports that accurately describe waterlogging extent, depth, risk and impact. This dual capability enables a shift of waterlogging monitoring from perception to generation, while the collaborative framework of multiple foundation models lays the groundwork for intelligent and scalable systems, supporting urban management, disaster response and climate resilience.
title Automated urban waterlogging assessment and early warning through a mixture of foundation models
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18425