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arXiv · 2311.14656

Charting New Territories: Exploring the Geographic and Geospatial Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs

Jonathan Roberts·Timo Lüddecke·Rehan Sheikh·Kai Han·Samuel Albanie
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Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a broad range of tasks but their knowledge and abilities in the geographic and geospatial domains are yet to be explored, despite potential wide-ranging benefits to navigation, environmental research, urban development, and disaster response. We conduct a series of experiments exploring various vision capabilities of MLLMs within these domains, particularly focusing on the frontier model GPT-4V, and benchmark its performance against open-source counterparts. Our methodology involves challenging these models with a small-scale geographic benchmark consisting of a suite of visual tasks, testing their abilities across a spectrum of complexity. The analysis uncovers not only where such models excel, including instances where they outperform humans, but also where they falter, providing a balanced view of their capabilities in the geographic domain. To enable the comparison and evaluation of future models, our benchmark will be publicly released.

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Jonathan Roberts, Timo Lüddecke, Rehan Sheikh, Kai Han, Samuel Albanie. 2023-11-24. Charting New Territories: Exploring the Geographic and Geospatial Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14656

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