English

Boundary-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for Wildfire Spread Prediction

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-07 v2

Abstract

Reliable wildfire spread prediction is vital for risk-aware emergency planning, yet most deep learning models lack principled uncertainty quantification (UQ). Further, for boundary-sensitive cases like wildfire spread, evaluating models with global metrics alone is often insufficient. To shift the focus of UQ evaluation toward a more operationally relevant approach, the Fire-Centered Evaluation Region (FCER) framework is introduced as a spatially conditioned protocol to characterize UQ within critical fire zones. Using FCER, an Ensemble is compared against an distilled single-pass student model on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset. The student model demonstrates comparable calibration and complementary uncertainty ranking in boundary-relevant regimes. Code is available at https://github.com/jonasvilhofunk/WildfireUQ-FCER

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.03148,
  title  = {Boundary-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for Wildfire Spread Prediction},
  author = {Jonas V. Funk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03148},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:49:28.475Z