TimeSpot: Benchmarking Geo-Temporal Understanding in Vision-Language Models in Real-World Settings

TL;DR

TimeSpot introduces a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the geo-temporal reasoning capabilities of vision-language models in real-world scenarios, revealing current limitations and guiding future research.

Contribution

This paper presents TimeSpot, a new benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for assessing geo-temporal understanding in vision-language models with real-world images.

Findings

State-of-the-art models perform poorly on geo-temporal tasks.

Supervised fine-tuning improves performance but remains inadequate.

Current models lack robust physical and temporal reasoning abilities.

Abstract

Geo-temporal understanding, the ability to infer location, time, and contextual properties from visual input alone, underpins applications such as disaster management, traffic planning, embodied navigation, world modeling, and geography education. Although recent vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced image geo-localization using cues like landmarks and road signs, their ability to reason about temporal signals and physically grounded spatial cues remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce TimeSpot, a benchmark for evaluating real-world geo-temporal reasoning in VLMs. TimeSpot comprises 1,455 ground-level images from 80 countries and requires structured prediction of temporal attributes (season, month, time of day, daylight phase) and geographic attributes (continent, country, climate zone, environment type, latitude-longitude) directly from visual evidence. It also includes spatial-temporal reasoning tasks that test physical plausibility under real-world uncertainty. Evaluations of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs show low performance, particularly for temporal inference. While supervised fine-tuning yields improvements, results remain insufficient, highlighting the need for new methods to achieve robust, physically grounded geo-temporal understanding. TimeSpot is available at: https://TimeSpot-GT.github.io.