GeoSAFE - A Novel Geospatial Artificial Intelligence Safety Assurance Framework and Evaluation for LLM Moderation

Nihar Sanda, Rajat Shinde, Sumit Nawathe, William Seawright, Shaona Ghosh, Manil Maskey


Abstract
The rapid progress of generative AI (Gen-AI) and large language models (LLMs) offers significant potential for geospatial applications, but simultaneously introduces critical privacy, security, and ethical risks. Existing general-purpose AI safety frameworks inadequately cover GeoAI-specific risks such as geolocation privacy violations and re-identification, with False Safe Rates exceeding 40% in some models. To address this, we present GeoSAFE (Geospatial Safety Assurance Framework and Evaluation), introducing the first GeoAI-specific safety taxonomy with six hazard categories and a multimodal GeoSAFE-Dataset. It includes 11694 textual prompts with explanations, augmented by real-world queries and images to reduce synthetic bias and reflect operational use. We benchmark model performance on detecting unsafe geospatial queries. Additionally, we present GeoSAFEGuard, an instruction-tuned LLM achieving 4.6% False Safe Rate, 0.4% False Unsafe Rate, and 97% F1-score on text-to-text evaluation of GeoSAFE-Dataset. An anonymous user-survey confirms human-GeoSAFE alignment emphasizing the urgent need for domain-specific safety evaluations as general-purpose LLMs fail to detect unsafe location-powered queries.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.137
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2214–2237
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.137/
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Cite (ACL):
Nihar Sanda, Rajat Shinde, Sumit Nawathe, William Seawright, Shaona Ghosh, and Manil Maskey. 2025. GeoSAFE - A Novel Geospatial Artificial Intelligence Safety Assurance Framework and Evaluation for LLM Moderation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2214–2237, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GeoSAFE - A Novel Geospatial Artificial Intelligence Safety Assurance Framework and Evaluation for LLM Moderation (Sanda et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.137.pdf