Proximity LLMs Encode Nearness From Text

A technical guide explains how large language models infer geographic proximity from text instead of GPS coordinates, detailing underlying embedding and trajectory-based similarity mechanisms. It surveys training signals, a taxonomy of spatial tasks, system architectures, and evaluation methods, citing benchmarks such as FloorplanQA (ICLR 2026) and SpatialMQA (ACL 2025) where top models scored 48.14% versus 98.40% human accuracy.