GeoBrowse: A Geolocation Benchmark for Agentic Tool Use with Expert-Annotated Reasoning Traces

TL;DR

GeoBrowse introduces a geolocation benchmark combining visual reasoning and multi-hop knowledge verification, supported by an agentic workflow and expert-annotated reasoning traces, to evaluate complex multi-step evidence integration.

Contribution

It presents a new geolocation benchmark with multi-level difficulty, a comprehensive evaluation workflow, and expert-annotated reasoning traces, advancing research in knowledge-intensive multi-step reasoning tasks.

Findings

GATE outperforms direct inference and open-source agents.

Coherent, level-specific tool-use plans improve evidence verification.

No-tool, search-only, or image-only setups are insufficient for accurate geolocation.

Abstract

Deep research agents integrate fragmented evidence through multi-step tool use. BrowseComp offers a text-only testbed for such agents, but existing multimodal benchmarks rarely require both weak visual cues composition and BrowseComp-style multi-hop verification. Geolocation is a natural testbed because answers depend on combining multiple ambiguous visual cues and validating them with open-web evidence. Thus, we introduce GeoBrowse, a geolocation benchmark that combines visual reasoning with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries. Level 1 tests extracting and composing fragmented visual cues, and Level 2 increases query difficulty by injecting long-tail knowledge and obfuscating key entities. To support evaluation, we provide an agentic workflow GATE with five think-with-image tools and four knowledge-intensive tools, and release expert-annotated stepwise traces grounded in verifiable evidence for trajectory-level analysis. Experiments show that GATE outperforms direct inference and open-source agents, indicating that no-tool, search-only or image-only setups are insufficient. Gains come from coherent, level-specific tool-use plans rather than more tool calls, as they more reliably reach annotated key evidence steps and make fewer errors when integrating into the final decision. The GeoBrowse bernchmark and codes are provided in https://github.com/ornamentt/GeoBrowse