Go to ACL ARR 2025 May homepageMapAgent: A Hierarchical Agent for Geospatial Reasoning with Dynamic Map Tool Integration
Abstract: Agentic AI has significantly extended the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling complex reasoning and tool use. However, most existing frameworks are tailored to domains such as mathematics, coding, or web automation, and fall short on geospatial tasks that require spatial reasoning, multi-hop planning, and real-time map interaction. To address these challenges, we introduce MapAgent, a hierarchical multi-agent plug-and-play framework with customized toolsets and agentic scaffolds for map-integrated geospatial reasoning. Unlike existing flat agent-based approaches that treat tools uniformly—often overwhelming the LLM when handling similar but subtly different geospatial APIs—MapAgent decouples planning from execution. A high-level planner decomposes complex queries into subgoals, which are routed to specialized modules. For tool-heavy modules—such as map-based services—we then design a dedicated map-tool agent that efficiently orchestrates related APIs adaptively in parallel to effectively fetch geospatial data relevant for the query, while simpler modules (e.g., solution generation or answer extraction) operate without additional agent overhead. This hierarchical design reduces cognitive load, improves tool selection accuracy, and enables precise coordination across similar APIs. We evaluate MapAgent on four diverse geospatial benchmarks—MapEval-Textual, MapEval-API, MapEval-Visual, and MapQA—and demonstrate substantial gains over state-of-the-art tool-augmented and agentic baselines.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: NLP Applications
Research Area Keywords: Compositional Reasoning, Geospatial Reasoning, Plug and Play, Hierarchical Agent
Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 4043
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