# Evidence-Grounded Multi-Agent Planning Support for Urban Carbon Governance via RAG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11587/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 3 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [The Chronicles of RAG: The Retriever, the Chunk and the Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07883/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urban carbon governance requires planners to integrate heterogeneous evidence -- emission inventories, statistical yearbooks, policy texts, technical measures, and academic findings -- into actionable, cross-departmental plans. Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist planning workflows, yet their factual reliability and evidential traceability remain critical barriers in professional use. This paper presents an evidence-grounded multi-agent planning support system for urban carbon governance built upon standard text-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (without GraphRAG). We align the system with the typical planning workflow by decomposing tasks into four specialized agents: (i) evidence Q&A for fact checking and compliance queries, (ii) emission status assessment for diagnostic analysis, (iii) planning recommendation for generating multi-sector governance pathways, and (iv) report integration for producing planning-style deliverables. We evaluate the system in two task families: factual retrieval and comprehensive planning generation. On factual retrieval tasks, introducing RAG increases the average score from below 6 to above 90, and dramatically improves key-field extraction (e.g., region and numeric values near 100% detection). A real-city case study (Ningbo, China) demonstrates end-to-end report generation with strong relevance, coverage, and coherence in expert review, while also highlighting boundary inconsistencies across data sources as a practical limitation.