arXiv Machine Learning

Do LLMs Know Your Neighborhood? Auditing LLM Priors for Neighborhood-Level Mobility Prediction and Structural Alignment

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can predict neighborhood-level human mobility without training data. Using anonymized Cuebiq data across four U.S. metropolitan areas, the authors compare zero‑shot LLM predictions to supervised baselines for various mobility outcomes and assess structural alignment with empirical trends. Results show supervised models outperform LLMs (average accuracy 0.580 vs. 0.435), with LLMs relying on coarse, stable priors that may exhibit biased treatment of protected-group predictors.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

BER-PEF: Unified Human Mobility Predictability Evaluation via Bayes Error Rate Estimation

BER-PEF is a Bayes‑error‑rate‑based framework that transforms BER estimation into human mobility predictability estimation, enabling comparison of different estimators even when ground truth predictability is not observable. It maps various data types—symbolic sequences, numeric trajectories, contextual features, and learned representations—into a shared feature–label space and evaluates estimator outputs along controlled perturbation curves against a common predictability reference interval. Experiments on datasets such as Foursquare NYC/TKY, GeoLife, and T‑Drive show that several BER‑based estimators outperform existing methods on symbolic sequences and numeric trajectories, and that aggregating evidence across multiple perturbation levels yields a more reliable basis for selecting estimators.

By En Xu, Jingtao Ding, Zhiwen Yu, Yong Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

TS-Mob: Social and Geographical-Aware Time Series Foundation-Model Framework for Human Mobility Prediction

arXiv:2507. 00945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Short-term forecasting of aggregated human mobility flows supports urban planning, intelligent transportation systems, and emergency response, yet existing models often require substantial mobility history and learn spatial structure implicitly through grids or graphs.

By Massimiliano Luca, Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Is Your Neighborhood Safe? Place-based Stigma in Large Language Models' Urban Safety Judgments

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to guide urban safety decisions, but this study shows that their judgments are more influenced by neighborhood names than by geographic coordinates. Across seven instruct‑tuned models tested on 186 neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago, name‑based ratings varied significantly and correlated with the proportion of locally dominant marginalized groups, while coordinate‑only ratings remained largely flat. The research finds that removing neighborhood names reduces both bias and accuracy, highlighting the complex role of demographic stereotypes and crime signals in LLM safety assessments.

By Huy Nguyen, Yue Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

LE4Mob: Towards Inductive, Distance-Aware and General-Purpose Location Embedding for Human Mobility Modelling

LE4Mob is a new location embedding framework that learns inductive, distance‑aware representations from geographic context, enabling it to encode unseen locations and preserve spatial relationships. It builds on contrastive language‑location pre‑training and adds a regularisation objective that encourages the embedding space to reflect geographic distance. Experiments on next‑location prediction and commuter flow generation across multiple datasets show that LE4Mob outperforms strong baselines, especially in inductive settings and when downstream models use direct interactions between location embeddings.

By Xinglei Wang, Stephen Law, Zichao Zeng, Junyuan Liu, Guangsheng Dong, Tao Cheng
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Synergistic Fusion of Topological Structure and Temporal Semantics of Mobility for Urban Region Embedding

The paper introduces Mobility Stream-Structure Synergy (MoSS), a method that fuses two complementary views of mobility data—an hourly inflow/outflow Sequence view and a Structure view derived from zigzag persistence diagrams—to capture temporal dynamics and evolving regional connectivity. MoSS employs a synergy module that extracts higher‑order representations from the co‑occurrence of these views, moving beyond additive fusion. Experiments on New York City and Chicago demonstrate that MoSS outperforms existing baselines on three downstream tasks using only mobility data.

By Namwoo Kim, Jeeyun Chang, Kanghoon Lee, Yoonjin Yoon