arXiv Machine Learning

What Words Keep of a Place: Zero-Shot Language Reasoning for Cross-View Geo-Localization

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

UniGeo: A Multi-modal Large Language Model for Text-Guided Cross-View Geo-Localization

UniGeo is a multimodal large language model designed for text-guided drone geo‑localization, enabling the identification of target regions in large image galleries from natural‑language descriptions. It integrates geo‑semantic understanding, cross‑view semantic generation, and candidate‑level verification within a shared vision‑language framework, establishing stable correspondences among local scene elements, spatial relations, and language. A multi‑stage training strategy progressively refines geo‑semantic learning, cross‑view mapping, and fine‑grained verification, yielding significant performance gains on GeoText‑1652, with R@10 and mAP improvements of 13.59 and 2.83 percentage points respectively.

By Jiahao Wen, Hang Yu, Zhedong Zheng
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 AI
Sep 10

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.

By Yifan Zhang, Kai Wang
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