Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models for Spatial Search

There have been many recent improvements in the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks and answer domain-specific questions through techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, reasoning abilities of LLMs, including spatial reasoning abilities, are still lacking. Spatial reasoning is a key component required to answer questions in a variety of domains that are grounded in the physical world, including urbanplanning, civil engineering, travel, and many others. To advance the development of LLMs and facilitate an impact in these domains, new research techniques must be developed to enable LLMs to reason over spatial data, which is commonly stored in the form of a graph. In this paper we outline the challenges associated with spatial reasoning through LLMs and envision a future in which search engines integrate with LLMs to answer complex spatial questions through graph-enhanced reasoning.

@article{schneider2025a, title={Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models for Spatial Search}, author={Schneider, Nicole R and O’Sullivan, Kent and Samet, Hanan}, journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. ISSN}, volume={2150}, pages={8097}, year={2025} }