Geospatial Reasoning

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Overview

Geospatial reasoning asks AI to locate places, measure distances and directions, understand map relationships, and analyze changes or patterns across Earth. Methods range from vision-language models for image geolocation to language-model agents that use GIS tools, and systems that represent space explicitly with coordinates, graphs, vectors, or executable spatial programs. Benchmarks test these abilities on satellite and street-view imagery, maps, geographic question answering, and multi-step environmental or disaster tasks. Models can often identify broad geographic context, but precise geometric computation, fine-grained localization, and reliable long tool-use workflows remain difficult; a key challenge is evaluating answers for spatial validity, not just plausibility.

Latest papers

CardsList

77 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, up 225% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. A Topology-Guided GeoAI Agentic Framework for Urban Flood Screening

    Oct 22, 2026Yutian Tao, Haoan Feng, Xin Xu +1Geospatial ReasoningFlood Inundation Mapping

    University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

  2. Geospatial Vector Geometry as a Native Spatial Modality for Vision-Language Models

    Oct 12, 2026Huang Fei, Boyi Chen, Hao Xue +3Vision-Language ModelsGeospatial Reasoning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China

  3. Google Earth AI Geospatial Reasoning Agent: Capabilities and a Systematic Evaluation

    Oct 11, 2026Noam Slonim, Aviv Slobodkin, Gil Fidel +34Geospatial QAGeospatial Reasoning

    Google Research · Google Geo · Spatial Bytes

  4. A Decade of PhotoMappers: A Longitudinal Study of Crowdsourced Disaster Photos Geolocalization with Vision-Language Models and Geospatial Reasoning

    Oct 11, 2026Hao Li, Wenping Yin, Fabian Deuser +5Geospatial ReasoningVLM Reasoning

    Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore · College of Geodesy and Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, China · University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany +6

  5. Mind the Spatial Gap: A Benchmark for Geospatial Reasoning and Constrained Spatial Editing

    Oct 9, 2026Zheng Ren, Yanning Wang, Ziheng Huang +4Geospatial Reasoning BenchmarksGeospatial Reasoning

    Urban Governance and Design (UGOD) Thrust The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China

  6. GeoFitBench-LLM: A Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models' Capabilities in Geospatial Data Requirements Elicitation for Geo-Analytic Tasks

    Oct 8, 2026Amirhossein Vahdat, Thierry Badard, Luc LamontagneLLM EvaluationGeospatial Reasoning Benchmarks

    Département des Sciences Géomatiques, Université Laval, QC, Canada · Département d’informatique et de génie logiciel, Université Laval, QC, Canada

  7. GeoNatureAgent (GNA): A Framework and Benchmark for Pre-Production Evaluation of Tool-Using Agents on Geospatial and Environmental Tasks

    Oct 6, 2026Gabriel Diaz-Ireland, Diego Prieto-Herráez, Mario García Peces +3Tool-Use EvaluationLLM Agent Evaluation

    Universidad Católica de Ávila (UCAV) Ávila, Spain · Independent Researcher Madrid, Spain · Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA +1

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

    Oct 5, 2026Ayesh Abu Lehyeh, Jay Hwasung Jung, Safwan WshahCross-View Geo-LocalizationLarge Vision-Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont

  9. From Pixels to Policy: A Multi-Agent System for Intervention and Geo-Spatial Decision Support

    Oct 1, 2026Hosam Elgendy, Utkarsh MallGeospatial ReasoningUrban Planning

    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  10. KilometerVision: A New Frontier for Large-Scale Spatial Intelligence in VLMs

    Sep 30, 2026Aravindh Mahendran, Michael King, Matthew Koichi Grimes +12Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksVisual Spatial Reasoning

    Google DeepMind, Berlin, Germany · Google DeepMind, London, UK · Princeton University, Princeton, USA +3

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

    Sep 30, 2026Joan PerezSpatial Reasoning BenchmarksLLM Grounding

    Urban Geo Analytics

  12. Decoding the Disaster: Multi-Task Geospatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models and Crowdsourced Imagery for Disaster Mapping

    Sep 28, 2026Wenping Yin, Fabian Desuer, Ziqi Liu +5Geospatial ReasoningCross-View Geo-Localization

    College of Geodesy and Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China · Professorship of Big Geospatial Data Management, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, Munich, 85521, Bavaria, Germany · State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China +6

  13. GeoCFM: Positive-Only Conditional Flow Matching for Mineral Occurrence Sampling

    Sep 28, 2026Moshe Eliasof, Eldad HaberConditional Flow MatchingGeospatial Reasoning

    Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel · Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, Canada

  14. ANASSA: An Agentic AI Orchestration Framework for Spatial Intelligence

    Sep 13, 2026Constantinos Papantoniou, Brian HiltonLLM Agent OrchestrationGeospatial Reasoning

    Anassa.ai USA · Research Scientist USA

  15. GeoSkill:Experience-Driven Hierarchical Skill Learning with Collaborative Revision forGeospatialAgents

    Sep 12, 2026Han Luo, Xian Xu, Yinhe Liu +1LLM Agent Skill LearningMemory-Augmented Agents

    Wuhan University

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

    Sep 4, 2026Yifan Zhang, Kai WangGeospatial Reasoning BenchmarksVLM Evaluation

  17. MineTRACE: An Evidence-Grounded Interactive Reasoning System for Mineral Prospectivity

    Sep 2, 2026Yiran Zhang, Jinwen Liu, Daniel Su +7Geospatial ReasoningEvidence-Grounded Generation

    1The University of Western Australia · 2Wilfrid Laurier University

  18. Perceive to Hypothesize, Verify to Ground: An Agentic Reasoning Framework for Open-World Geo-Localization

    Aug 30, 2026Yutian Jiang, Ruijie Li, Sisuo Lyu +4Multimodal GroundingGeospatial Reasoning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  19. LifePlanner: Evaluating LLM Agents for Geo-spatial Planning with Social Media Data

    Aug 25, 2026Zhen Dong, Yuning Peng, Yutao Shi +4Geospatial Reasoning BenchmarksLLM Agent Evaluation

    Wuhan University · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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

    Aug 25, 2026Shuaishuai Cao, Min Huang, Meng Tang +3Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksGeospatial Reasoning

    Central South University · Jiangxi Normal University · Hohai University +2

  21. Toward AI-Friendly Cartography: Understanding How Color Design Influences Foundation Model Spatial Reasoning on Sequential Choropleth Maps

    Aug 16, 2026Yonghe Sun, Zhenjia Liu, Hua Liao +4Data VisualizationGeospatial Reasoning

    School of Geographic Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China. · Hunan Key Laboratory of Geospatial Big Data Mining and Application, Changsha, China. · School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China. +2

  22. Click2Poly: A VLM for vector mapping buildings and walls

    Aug 11, 2026Nicolas Girard, Jawher Ben Abdallah, Arno Gobbin +2Vision-Language ModelsBuilding Footprint Extraction

    LuxCarta

  23. GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoning

    Aug 11, 2026Xin Xiao, Jiang Zhong, Junnan Zhu +4Agent MemoryGeospatial Reasoning

    School of Computer Science, Chongqing University · MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences

  24. GeoBenchLLM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Geo-Related Tasks

    Aug 7, 2026Rodrigo Ferreira Rodrigues, Karim Radouane, Jose G Moreno +1Spatial Reasoning BenchmarksLLM Evaluation

    University of Toulouse Toulouse, France

  25. LMM Modality Transfer: A Pre-requisite for Autonomous GIS Agents

    Aug 7, 2026Ivan Majic, Zexian Huang, Franziska Hübl +5Cross-Modal AlignmentMultimodal Large Language Models

    Graz University of Technology, Austria · University of Vienna, Austria · University of Liverpool, UK

  26. Georeferencing Non-Gazetteered Place Names using Biological Specimen Records

    Aug 7, 2026Aneesha Fernando, Surangika Ranathunga, Kristin Stock +2Geospatial Reasoning

    School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand · Joint Centre for Disaster Research, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand · School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

  27. Multi-Year Geospatial Reasoning using Interannually-Consistent Historical Predictions as a Free Input Modality

    Aug 6, 2026Syed Roshaan Ali Shah, Kasper Bonte, David Bekaert +2Agricultural Image AnalysisAgricultural Remote Sensing

    VITO Remote Sensing, Mol, Belgium

  28. MultiGlobeQA: A Multilingual and Globally Diverse Benchmark for Geospatial Reasoning

    Aug 4, 2026Martin Böckling, Elizaveta Nosova, Heiko Paulheim +1Spatial ReasoningMultilingual QA

    Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim, Germany

  29. DisasterTD: Disaster Toponym Disambiguation Using Multimodal LLMs and Cross-View Geolocalization

    Jul 26, 2026Wenping Yin, Ziqi Liu, Naixia Mou +3Entity ResolutionCross-View Geo-Localization

    College of Geodesy and Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China · School of Environmental Science and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China · State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China +3

  30. Do Maps Still Matter for Machines: Revisiting the Role of Choropleth Maps in Foundation Model Spatial Understanding

    Jul 20, 2026Zhiwei Wei, Yonghe Sun, Zhenjia Liu +5Data VisualizationSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

    aSchool of Geographic Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China · bHunan Key Laboratory of Geospatial Big Data Mining and Application, Changsha, China · cSchool of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China +3