MapEval: A Map-Based Evaluation of Geo-Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models

Recent advancements in foundation models have enhanced AI systems' capabilities in autonomous tool usage and reasoning. However, their ability in location or map-based reasoning - which improves daily life by optimizing navigation, facilitating resource discovery, and streamlining logistics - has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapEval, a benchmark designed to assess diverse and complex map-based user queries with geo-spatial reasoning. MapEval features three task types (textual, API-based, and visual) that require collecting world information via map tools, processing heterogeneous geo-spatial contexts (e.g., named entities, travel distances, user reviews or ratings, images), and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. Comprising 700 unique multiple-choice questions about locations across 180 cities and 54 countries, MapEval evaluates foundation models' ability to handle spatial relationships, map infographics, travel planning, and navigation challenges. Using MapEval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 28 prominent foundation models. While no single model excelled across all tasks, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini-1.5-Pro achieved competitive performance overall. However, substantial performance gaps emerged, particularly in MapEval, where agents with Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro by 16% and 21%, respectively, and the gaps became even more amplified when compared to open-source LLMs. Our detailed analyses provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current models, though all models still fall short of human performance by more than 20% on average, struggling with complex map images and rigorous geo-spatial reasoning. This gap highlights MapEval's critical role in advancing general-purpose foundation models with stronger geo-spatial understanding.

A Multi-Modal Deep Learning Based Approach for House Price Prediction

Accurate prediction of house price, a vital aspect of the residential real estate sector, is of substantial interest for a wide range of stakeholders. However, predicting house prices is a complex task due to the significant variability influenced by factors such as house features, location, neighborhood, and many others. Despite numerous attempts utilizing a wide array of algorithms, including recent deep learning techniques, to predict house prices accurately, existing approaches have fallen short of considering a wide range of factors such as textual and visual features. This paper addresses this gap by comprehensively incorporating attributes, such as features, textual descriptions, geo-spatial neighborhood, and house images, typically showcased in real estate listings in a house price prediction system. Specifically, we propose a multi-modal deep learning approach that leverages different types of data to learn more accurate representation of the house. In particular, we learn a joint embedding of raw house attributes, geo-spatial neighborhood, and most importantly from textual description and images representing the house; and finally use a downstream regression model to predict the house price from this jointly learned embedding vector. Our experimental results with a real-world dataset show that the text embedding of the house advertisement description and image embedding of the house pictures in addition to raw attributes and geo-spatial embedding, can significantly improve the house price prediction accuracy. The relevant source code and dataset are publicly accessible at the following URL: https://github.com/4P0N/mhpp