Arka Mukherjee
Author directory2026
GeoAgent: Evaluating VLM Geolocalization Through Embodied Navigation
Arka Mukherjee | Soham Roy | Kartikeya Trivedi | Shreya Ghosh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Arka Mukherjee | Soham Roy | Kartikeya Trivedi | Shreya Ghosh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well above the human baseline in image geolocalization, a task critically important in disaster response, OSINT verification, and location privacy. However, most efforts to study AI behavior on the task remain limited to static image-based retrieval, classification, and predictions. We argue that faithful recreation of the task should involve embodied navigation, where a multimodal agent autonomously explores its surroundings to gather observations before submitting a prediction. To this end, we introduce **GeoAgent**, an agentic environment-based benchmark that requires agents to navigate Street View environments to refine their geolocalization through sequential reasoning. Our analysis shows that modern VLMs struggle to discern regional patterns while succeeding at country- and continent-level predictions. When compared to static image-based baselines, agentic navigation significantly improves accuracy across established metrics. We also note severe bias in a developed/developing region context across frontier model architectures and poor self-improvement capabilities given incorrect priors. Overall, our work establishes the challenges of embodied navigation and geospatial reasoning. We publicly release our code and the GeoAgent environment: https://geoagent-benchmark.github.io
2025
mmJEE-Eval: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Arka Mukherjee | Shreya Ghosh
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Arka Mukherjee | Shreya Ghosh
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Contemporary vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks (78-85% accuracy on MMMU, MathVista). Yet, these results fail to sufficiently distinguish true scientific reasoning articulation capabilities from pattern-matching. To address this gap, we introduce mmJEE-Eval, a multimodal bilingual (English and Hindi) benchmark comprising 1,460 questions from India’s JEE Advanced examination (2019-2025) spanning pre-college Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics domains. Our evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art models reveals that while frontier VLMs (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash) achieve 77-84% accuracy on held-out 2025 questions, open-source models plateau at 37-45% despite scaling to 400B parameters, a significant difference not observed on existing benchmarks. While closed frontiers from Google and OpenAI show high problem-solving accuracies (up to 100% pass@3 scores), they fully collapse when the reasoning load is increased meta-cognitively (GPT-5 fixes just 5.2% errors). Systematic ablations show mmJEE-Eval’s difficulty stems from complexity and reasoning depth rather than memorization. Effectively, our benchmark segregates superior training and reasoning methodologies where alternatives fail. We publicly release our code and data: https://mmjee-eval.github.io