TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning

Hang Ni, Fan Liu, Xinyu Ma, Lixin Su, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Hui Xiong, Hao Liu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating travel planning, yet they often fall short in addressing nuanced spatiotemporal rationality. While existing benchmarks focus on basic plan validity, they neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability. This paper introduces **TP-RAG**, the first benchmark tailored for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning. Our dataset includes 2,348 real-world travel queries, 85,575 fine-grain annotated POIs, and 18,784 high-quality travel trajectory references sourced from online tourist documents, enabling dynamic and context-aware planning. Through extensive experiments, we reveal that integrating reference trajectories significantly improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality of the travel plan, while challenges persist in universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data. To address these issues, we propose *EvoRAG*, an evolutionary framework that potently synergizes diverse retrieved trajectories with LLMs’ intrinsic reasoning. *EvoRAG* achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving spatiotemporal compliance and reducing commonsense violation compared to ground-up and retrieval-augmented baselines. Our work underscores the potential of hybridizing Web knowledge with LLM-driven optimization, paving the way for more reliable and adaptive travel planning agents.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.626
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12403–12429
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.626/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hang Ni, Fan Liu, Xinyu Ma, Lixin Su, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Hui Xiong, and Hao Liu. 2025. TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12403–12429, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning (Ni et al., EMNLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.626.pdf
Checklist:
 2025.emnlp-main.626.checklist.pdf