GeoLLM-Engine: A Realistic Environment for Building Geospatial Copilots (2404.15500v1)

Abstract: Geospatial Copilots unlock unprecedented potential for performing Earth Observation (EO) applications through natural language instructions. However, existing agents rely on overly simplified single tasks and template-based prompts, creating a disconnect with real-world scenarios. In this work, we present GeoLLM-Engine, an environment for tool-augmented agents with intricate tasks routinely executed by analysts on remote sensing platforms. We enrich our environment with geospatial API tools, dynamic maps/UIs, and external multimodal knowledge bases to properly gauge an agent's proficiency in interpreting realistic high-level natural language commands and its functional correctness in task completions. By alleviating overheads typically associated with human-in-the-loop benchmark curation, we harness our massively parallel engine across 100 GPT-4-Turbo nodes, scaling to over half a million diverse multi-tool tasks and across 1.1 million satellite images. By moving beyond traditional single-task image-caption paradigms, we investigate state-of-the-art agents and prompting techniques against long-horizon prompts.