AI (super) alignment describes the challenge of ensuring (future) AI systems behave in accordance with societal norms and goals. While a quickly evolving literature is addressing biases and inequalities, the geographic variability of alignment remains underexplored. Simply put, what is considered appropriate, truthful, or legal can differ widely across regions due to cultural norms, political realities, and legislation. Alignment measures applied to AI/ML workflows can sometimes produce outcomes that diverge from statistical realities, such as text-to-image models depicting balanced gender ratios in company leadership despite existing imbalances. Crucially, some model outputs are globally acceptable, while others, e.g., questions about Kashmir, depend on knowing the user's location and their context. This geographic sensitivity is not new. For instance, Google Maps renders Kashmir's borders differently based on user location. What is new is the unprecedented scale and automation with which AI now mediates knowledge, expresses opinions, and represents geographic reality to millions of users worldwide, often with little transparency about how context is managed. As we approach Agentic AI, the need for spatio-temporally aware alignment, rather than one-size-fits-all approaches, is increasingly urgent. This paper reviews key geographic research problems, suggests topics for future work, and outlines methods for assessing alignment sensitivity.

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.