From Next Day Wildfire to Next Days Wildfire: A New Multi-Continent Dataset of Active-Fire Spread for Sequence-to-Sequence Forecasting

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Benchmarks such as WildfireSpreadTS (WSTS) have enabled data-driven forecasting of wildfire spread from multimodal satellite time series, but they suffer from limitations: size restricts them to large fires that burn for weeks, and they are from similar environments. We introduce AFSeq, a multimodal dataset of 1,194 recent fire events (2023 to 2026) from 8 different countries across three regions, dominated by the short, small fires that existing benchmarks underrepresent. Our dataset is the largest and most diverse to date for time-series-based wildfire spread prediction. We also introduce UTAE-AR, an extension of a classical U-Net with Temporal Auto Encoder, enhanced with recurrent modules before the decoder. This allows the model to not only predict the next day but the whole sequence in an autoregressive way. Moreover, our model can feed its own predicted fire mask back one day at a time, producing the day-by-day forecasts that single-step models cannot. Our results show that UTAE-AR surpasses state-of-the-art on both WSTS, WSTS+ and AFSeq for next-day accuracy while having 21.5% of their parameters, and being able to predict confidently at a longer horizon.