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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XII-4-W1-2026-317-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>An Exploratory Study of Transformer-Based Generative AI Surrogate Modeling for 3D Wildfire Spread Simulation in Voxelized City</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Xu</surname>
<given-names>Haowen</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zlatanova</surname>
<given-names>Sisi</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8766-0487</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liang</surname>
<given-names>Ruiyu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Canbulat</surname>
<given-names>Ismet</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>GRID, School of Built Environment, UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering, UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>28</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XII-4/W1-2026</volume>
<fpage>317</fpage>
<lpage>324</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Haowen Xu et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XII-4-W1-2026/317/2026/isprs-annals-XII-4-W1-2026-317-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XII-4-W1-2026/317/2026/isprs-annals-XII-4-W1-2026-317-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XII-4-W1-2026/317/2026/isprs-annals-XII-4-W1-2026-317-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XII-4-W1-2026/317/2026/isprs-annals-XII-4-W1-2026-317-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Accurate and efficient simulation of wildfire spread in complex wildland&amp;ndash;urban interface (WUI) environments remains a significant challenge due to the high computational cost of physics-based models and the limited fidelity of simplified approaches. This study presents an exploratory generative AI surrogate model for 3D wildfire simulation in voxelized urban environments. The proposed framework leverages a patch-based Transformer architecture with convolutional embedding and autoregressive modeling to learn spatiotemporal fire dynamics from data generated by a physics-based simulation model. Environmental and physical drivers, including fuel properties, wind conditions, and terrain characteristics, are encoded as aligned multi-channel voxel features to provide structured inputs for learning. The model predicts voxel-wise combustion states over time, enabling efficient temporal rollout of fire spread without explicitly simulating the full physical process. A pilot study using over 800 simulated scenarios demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves strong predictive performance, with voxel-wise accuracy ranging from 76% to 100%, while maintaining inference times on the order of 90&amp;ndash;220 milliseconds per timestep. The results indicate that the model can effectively capture both spatial propagation and temporal evolution of wildfire dynamics, closely approximating the behavior of the underlying physics-based simulations. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using generative AI as an efficient surrogate for high-resolution 3D wildfire modeling, providing a foundation for scalable, real-time fire simulation and potential integration into urban-scale digital twin systems.</p>
</abstract>
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