GeoGround: Uncertainty-Weighted Multi-Task Learning for Geo-Alignment and Address Defect Detection

Srinivas Virinchi, Aman Gulati, Anoop Saladi


Abstract
Address intelligence in e-commerce demands accurate geocoding and proactive defect detection under strict sub-50 ms latency constraints. These tasks are inherently coupled: precise spatial grounding provides a strong prior for defect propensity, yet prior approaches optimize them independently. While generative LLMs offer rich semantic representations, they lack spatial inductive bias and fail to meet real-time serving requirements. We introduce GeoGround, a multi-task learning framework that jointly models coordinate grounding and address defect detection. The model combines a hierarchical spatial grounding objective with Focal Loss for defect classification, using uncertainty-based task weighting to balance optimization under severe class imbalance. To strengthen supervision, we curate a large-scale noisy address dataset using LLM-assisted data construction, augmenting the training corpus with signals that are costly to obtain manually. GeoGround achieves 5.86× gains in address defect detection precision and up to 4.86× improvements in location prediction accuracy over strong encoder baselines, while remaining 75× more efficient than decoder LLMs such as Qwen2-1.5B. A two-week online A/B test in a large-scale delivery pipeline confirms real-world impact, yielding a 50 bps uplift in defect detection, a 40 bps gain in location prediction, and an estimated operational savings of $3.09M annually.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-industry.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Georg Rehm, Mei Tu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
410–419
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.27/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Srinivas Virinchi, Aman Gulati, and Anoop Saladi. 2026. GeoGround: Uncertainty-Weighted Multi-Task Learning for Geo-Alignment and Address Defect Detection. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 410–419, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GeoGround: Uncertainty-Weighted Multi-Task Learning for Geo-Alignment and Address Defect Detection (Virinchi et al., ACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-industry.27.pdf