Google Earth AI Geospatial Reasoning Agent: Capabilities and a Systematic Evaluation
Noam Slonim, Aviv Slobodkin, Gil Fidel, Gal Moshitch, Mimi Sun, Lily Mihalkova, Joydeep Paul, Per Bjornsson 等 37 位作者
AI 速览：介绍由 Gemini 驱动的 Google Earth AI 地理空间推理智能体 GRA，并发布两个基准，系统评估其工具与智能体编排的贡献。
Google Earth AI is a family of geospatial AI models, together with an agent that orchestrates them. We present this agent, Google Earth AI's Geospatial Reasoning agent (GRA), a Gemini-powered research system that combines geospatial data sources, foundation models, and tools to answer questions about our planet. GRA organizes these into modular domain skills and pairs them with upfront geospatial planning to decompose complex queries into multi-stage workflows. Evaluating such systems is hard: real-world problems admit multiple valid workflows, require data discovery across large catalogs, and rely on evolving ground truth. We introduce two benchmarks and release their development splits. GeoExpertQueries poses complex analytical problems grounded in practitioner use cases and refined by geospatial experts; each is paired with a consensus golden workflow from three independent experts and scored by a human-validated, tool-agnostic autorater. GeoKTools consists of templated queries with deterministic reference solvers that systematically vary the number of required tool types. We also use two external benchmarks, CBGB and UnivEARTH; the latter we find to be saturated. To isolate the contribution of GRA's tools and its agentic orchestration, we compare four configurations, each with Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.8 Flash: a standalone LLM, the LLM with basic tools, the LLM with GRA's skills and tools but without its upfront planning and execution guidance, and GRA itself. With at most basic tools, an advanced model recovers much of the answer on templated queries but satisfies only a small fraction of the expert workflows on open-ended problems; GRA performs well on both. The largest step comes from GRA's skills and tools; on open-ended problems, its planning and execution guidance add a further gain with Gemini 3.8 Flash, letting Flash match or exceed Pro at lower cost.
AI 速览：提出自主AI系统PPE，从自然语言查询出发自动完成多模态地理空间数据检索、融合与模型搜索，并在多个健康、风险与流行病预测任务上报告优于专家基线。
Addressing critical global challenges, from food security and disaster risk to disease outbreaks and socio-economic vulnerability, demands high-fidelity geospatial modeling. However, building predictive planetary models remains bottlenecked by a fragmented data ecosystem, requiring manual data retrieval, multimodal data curation and fusion along with iterative model selection. We present the Planetary Prediction Engine (PPE), an autonomous AI system that executes this end-to-end workflow directly from natural-language queries. PPE synthesizes multimodal datasets on the fly, retrieving spatiotemporally relevant covariates across open-web and Earth observation platforms (Data Commons, Google Earth Engine) and fusing them with geospatial foundation model embeddings (PDFM, AlphaEarth). Simultaneously, it searches over task-tailored model architecture families with automated overfitting guards. Across diverse tasks, geographies, and scientific domains, PPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art or manually tuned expert baselines. For US spatial regression, PPE improves mean $R^2$ across 21 CDC health indicators (76.8% vs. 60.0%), FEMA national risk indices (64.9% vs. 60.0%), and the Social Vulnerability Index (66.2% vs. 58.6%). For spatial downscaling in data-scarce settings, PPE integrates localized proxies to double baseline accuracy in Nigerian food security indicators ($R^2$ of 66.1% vs. 31.5%). For epidemiological nowcasting of the 2026 DRC Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, PPE achieves a Recall@10 of 83.3% (identifying 15 of 18 newly invaded health zones across five weekly forecasts), a +10.3 percentage-point improvement over the public state-of-the-art modeling (~73%). By combining autonomous multimodal planetary data discovery with targeted model optimization, PPE lowers the technical barrier to planetary-scale analytics, enabling rapid, customized, expert-level deployment.
Aaron Bell, Amit Aides, Amr Helmy, Arbaaz Muslim, Aviad Barzilai, Aviv Slobodkin, Bolous Jaber, David Schottlander 等 60 位作者
Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales, and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning that enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains--Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment--and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine. We present rigorous benchmarks showcasing the power and novel capabilities of our foundation models and validate that when used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.