arXiv AI

GeoContext: One Context Ladder, Two Failure Modes in Vision-Language Geolocation: Flat Reliance on User-Provided Location Context and False Confirmation of Location Claims

GeoContext is a new vision‑language geolocation benchmark that introduces two tasks: GeoHint, where a model must localize an image given a coarse location hint, and GeoVerify, where a model must decide if an image was taken within 150 m of a claimed place. The benchmark builds a context ladder by stratifying nearby reference points by distance and referenceability, allowing the same image to be evaluated under varying context. Evaluation of five models on 109 sites in 30 cities shows that hint repetition is low, localization error grows with hint distance, and models struggle to achieve high discriminability in GeoVerify, with many false acceptances reported with high confidence.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction

GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.

By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

GeoStore: Finding Small Storefronts in Large Scenes -- A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark with Global-to-Local Asymmetric Matching

GeoStore is a new benchmark for fine‑grained point‑of‑interest (POI) localization that matches close‑up storefront photos against large geo‑tagged street‑view images, a task distinct from traditional visual place recognition. The paper shows that global‑descriptor methods designed for symmetric matching perform poorly on this asymmetric problem, and introduces GLAM, a Global‑to‑Local Asymmetric Matching approach that combines a global retrieval anchor with a lightweight local re‑ranking using pooled region tokens. GLAM achieves higher Recall@1/5/10 and mAP than strong baselines while using far fewer re‑ranking features and significantly lower per‑pair matching cost.

By Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang, Zhiqiang Cao, Ruihuan Du, Ziquan Zeng, Chunlong Lv
arXiv AI
Sep 25

GeoRefer-Bench: A Benchmark from Referring Pixels to Verifiable Geospatial Reasoning

GeoRefer-Bench is a new benchmark for verifiable geospatial referring segmentation that evaluates whether models correctly resolve spatial relations in overhead imagery. Each query is expressed as an executable logical form over a metric scene graph, and predictions are scored with Exact Query Success (EQS), requiring an exact match to the query’s referent set. The dataset contains 700 UAV scenes, 26,217 instances, 142,796 spatial relations, 20,916 executable queries across five reasoning levels, and additional paraphrases, unanswerable queries, counterfactual pairs, and leakage‑controlled splits.

By Shuaishuai Cao, Min Huang, Meng Tang, Xuan Liu, Youjin Wang, Hui Lin
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Textual Supervision Enhances Geospatial Representations in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 07172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial understanding is a critical yet underexplored dimension in the development of machine learning systems for tasks such as image geolocation and spatial reasoning.

By Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Fernando Tonucci, Jea Kwon, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Bryan Nathanael Wijaya, Cheng Yaw Low, Virgilio Almeida, Meeyoung Cha
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Network-based Spatial Context Retrieval for Open-weight LLMs: A Faithfulness Benchmark for Grounded Geographic Reasoning

The paper introduces a network‑based spatial context retrieval pipeline that uses pedestrian street networks and open data (OpenStreetMap, GHS‑POP) to generate compact spatial briefs for open‑weight large language models. It then builds a faithfulness benchmark that labels each model claim by its source—whether grounded in the brief or drawn from training knowledge—and tests models against planted false premises across multiple cities and model configurations. The study finds that model family and generation influence resistance to false premises more than model size, revealing dimensions of spatial reasoning not captured by traditional correctness metrics.

By Joan Perez