English

N-Tree Diffusion for Long-Horizon Wildfire Risk Forecasting

Machine Learning 2026-03-10 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Long-horizon wildfire risk forecasting requires generating probabilistic spatial fields under sparse event supervision while maintaining computational efficiency across multiple prediction horizons. Extending diffusion models to multi-step forecasting typically repeats the denoising process independently for each horizon, leading to redundant computation. We introduce N-Tree Diffusion (NT-Diffusion), a hierarchical diffusion model designed for long-horizon wildfire risk forecasting. Fire occurrences are represented as continuous Fire Risk Maps (FRMs), which provide a smoothed spatial risk field suitable for probabilistic modeling. Instead of running separate diffusion trajectories for each predicted timestamp, NT-Diffusion shares early denoising stages and branches at later levels, allowing horizon-specific refinement while reducing redundant sampling. We evaluate the proposed framework on a newly collected real-world wildfire dataset constructed for long-horizon probabilistic prediction. Results indicate that NT-Diffusion achieves consistent accuracy improvements and reduced inference cost compared to baseline forecasting approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.07361,
  title  = {N-Tree Diffusion for Long-Horizon Wildfire Risk Forecasting},
  author = {Yucheng Xing and Xin Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07361},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:08:44.775Z