Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread
This work addresses the need for more accurate wildfire spread prediction for emergency management, offering a physically interpretable model with improved performance.
The paper introduces a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Cellular Automata model for wildfire spread that achieves IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecasts on six large-scale wildfires, outperforming traditional models that underpredicted spread.
Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.