Ruiyu Ning
2026
Spatial-RAG: Spatial Retrieval Augmented Generation for Real-World Geospatial Reasoning Questions
Dazhou Yu | Riyang Bao | Ruiyu Ning | Jinghong Peng | Gengchen Mai | Liang Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dazhou Yu | Riyang Bao | Ruiyu Ning | Jinghong Peng | Gengchen Mai | Liang Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Answering real-world geospatial questions—such as finding restaurants along a travel route or amenities near a landmark—requires reasoning over both geographic relationships and semantic user intent. However, existing large language models (LLMs) lack spatial computing capabilities and access to up-to-date, ubiquitous real-world geospatial data, while traditional geospatial systems fall short in interpreting natural language. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial-RAG, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for geospatial question answering. Spatial-RAG integrates structured spatial databases with LLMs via a hybrid spatial retriever that combines sparse spatial filtering and dense semantic matching. It formulates the answering process as a multi-objective optimization over spatial and semantic relevance, identifying Pareto-optimal candidates and dynamically selecting the best response based on user intent. Experiments across multiple tourism and map-based QA datasets show that Spatial-RAG significantly improves performance over strong baselines.