Do Maps Still Matter for Machines: Revisiting the Role of Choropleth Maps in Foundation Model Spatial Understanding
arXiv:2607.17999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial understanding is crucial for foundation models (FMs), and maps have long helped humans organize and reason about geographic information. This study examines whether choropleth maps remain useful for machine spatial understanding when models can directly process structured geodata. We introduce ChoroplethMap-Bench, a controlled benchmark containing 2,400 synthetic choropleth maps, corresponding GeoJSON data, and 12,000 questions across five