Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation
Organizations: Dept. of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada · SkyWatch, Kitchener, ON, N2H 2G8, Canada · Dept. of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada · Dept. of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada
Abstract
We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliable, semantically aligned interaction with external data services. The modular framework is portable across platforms through API schema substitution and supports applications in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and climate analysis. It establishes a scalable interface between user intent and geospatial infrastructure, enabling streamlined and automated Earth observation workflows. Preliminary experiments under adversarial multi-turn settings show that prompt-level safety instructions improve robustness, although rare high-impact failures persist in API manipulation scenarios and highlight the need for adaptive, system-level defenses that balance safety, usability, and cost efficiency, which motivates the use of our intercept-level Guardrail agent.