DisasterBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for UAV-Based Disaster Response in Complex Environments

When a disaster unfolds, responders must answer not only what is happening, but also why it is happening, what will happen next, and what to do now, often from noisy low-altitude UAV views and under tight on-site compute constraints. However, most existing multimodal benchmarks emphasize perception (e.g., recognition/description), cover limited disaster types, and provide insufficient support for the multi-stage reasoning required in practical emergency response. We introduce DisasterBench, a multi-stage multimodal reasoning benchmark for UAV-Based disaster response in complex environments. DisasterBench spans 14 disaster-related scene types and 9 response-critical tasks across pre-, during-, and post-disaster stages, with fine-grained disaster-task mappings that explicitly test causal attribution, propagation prediction, damage analysis, and decision-oriented reasoning. To enable reasoning on the edge, we further propose DisasterVL, a lightweight multimodal model optimized with a three-stage pipeline combining domain instruction tuning, chain-of-thought-guided multimodal alignment, and reinforcement learning-based policy optimization. Experiments across 21 popular MLLMs show that our 2B-parameter DisasterVL outperforms all evaluated open-source models and substantially narrows the gap to state-of-the-art closed-source models, achieving GPT-4o-comparable reasoning accuracy with superior efficiency. The project page is available at https://github.com/TanmouTT/DisasterBench.