arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

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.

By Saad Mohammad Abrar, Eesha Kurella, Arnav Dadarya, Naman Awasthi, Kazi Tasnim Zinat, Vanessa Frias-Martinez
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Learning to Transfer Across Modes: Towards Unified Urban Mobility Forecasting

The paper introduces TransMod, a unified framework for forecasting urban mobility demand across multiple transportation modes. It creates a shared zone-level spatial representation to align systems with different spatial granularities, reducing structural mismatch and distributional shift. TransMod then learns transferable spatio-temporal patterns from data-rich source modes and adapts them to data-scarce target modes, improving forecasting performance when target data is limited.

By Yixuan Zhao, Man Luo
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

Fine-tuning LLMs for Tourist Trajectory Prediction using Field Experiment Data

The paper demonstrates that fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) on local tourist trajectory data can predict visitor movements under varying conditions. Using 566 trajectories from Wakayama Castle Park, Japan, the authors fine‑tuned Llama‑3.1‑8B, achieving 49.1% accuracy for next point‑of‑interest predictions and maintaining strong performance even on undersampled scenarios such as rainy days. This shows that LLMs can serve as high‑fidelity, context‑aware behavior models for tourist prediction and enable counterfactual analysis of mobility interventions.

By Tatsuya Amano, Hirozumi Yamaguchi
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
Sep 10

Inferring Urban Mobility Interactions from Aggregated Dynamics

The paper demonstrates that real‑time urban mobility patterns can be reconstructed from aggregated area‑level counts, without tracking individuals. Using a physics‑informed, uncertainty‑aware framework, the authors infer future origin‑destination flows across twelve datasets from the U.S. and China, achieving accuracy comparable to models that use historical OD matrices. Probabilistic modeling corrects underestimation of sparse corridors, and architectures that preserve spatial heterogeneity before reconstructing pairwise interactions yield more faithful interaction estimates.

By Yi Wang, Jing Li, Jinliang Deng, Zhenghong Wang, Yizhi Zhang, Fan Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Yu Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 10

MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation

arXiv:2607. 08357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility data are essential for transportation optimization, urban planning, and resource allocation, yet real-world mobility data are costly to collect and difficult to share due to privacy concerns.

By Rongchao Xu, Lin Jiang, Dahai Yu, Ximiao Li, Taichi Liu, Desheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Guang Wang