arXiv AI

Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation Strategies for Large Language Model-Based Travel Mode Choice Prediction

The paper evaluates how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can improve Large Language Model (LLM) predictions of travel mode choice. Four retrieval strategies—basic RAG, balanced retrieval, cross‑encoder re‑ranking, and a combination of balanced retrieval with cross‑encoder—are tested on three LLMs (GPT‑4o, o4‑mini, o3) using 2023 Puget Sound travel survey data. Results show that RAG boosts accuracy across models, with GPT‑4o plus balanced retrieval and cross‑encoder achieving 80.8% accuracy, surpassing traditional statistical and machine learning baselines and demonstrating strong zero‑shot transfer.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

TravelEval: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Framework for Evaluating LLM-Powered Travel Planning Agents

arXiv:2606. 01046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved travel planning applications, yet evaluating such models is limited by existing benchmarks' limitations: 1) overemphasis on constraint compliance, neglecting multi-dimensional qualities like spatio-temporal cost; 2) datasets lacking real-world authenticity and coverage in key areas (e.

By Weiyi Chen, Shuaixiong Wang, Ziyun Gao, Kaichun Hu, Wangze Ni, Shimin Di, Chen Jason Zhang, Lei Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 21

An Agentic Approach for Active Data Collection, Travel Behavior Modeling, and Weather-Sensitive Demand Prediction

arXiv:2608. 20320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Travel behavior research increasingly combines digital data collection with predictive modeling, yet these stages are often developed and evaluated separately.

By Narges Ahmadi (McGill University), Yubo Jiao (McGill University), J\^onatas Augusto Manzolli (McGill University), Jiangbo Yu (McGill University), Luis Miranda-Moreno (McGill University)
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 AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Capturing Context-Aware Route Choice Semantics for Trajectory Representation Learning

arXiv:2510. 14819v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Trajectory representation learning (TRL) aims to encode raw trajectory data into low-dimensional embeddings for downstream tasks such as travel time estimation, mobility prediction, and trajectory similarity analysis.

By Ji Cao, Yu Wang, Tongya Zheng, Jie Song, Qinghong Guo, Zujie Ren, Canghong Jin, Gang Chen, Mingli Song
arXiv AI
6d ago

Behavior2Trip: Towards Personalized Travel Planning via User Behavior Trajectory

Behavior2Trip introduces a new task—Behavior‑Aware Travel Planning—where user preferences are inferred from past behavior trajectories rather than explicit instructions. The benchmark contains 11,400 instances from a major Chinese travel platform, each with nearly 40 recorded behaviors across 14 attributes and 5 preference dimensions. A reinforcement‑learning agent, B2T‑Agent, leverages these trajectories, external retrieval tools, and internal memory, outperforming GPT‑4.1 and other baselines on the dataset.

By Zihao Cheng, Yingyu Shan, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Xinyi Wang, Xiangrong Zhu, Yuhang Guo, Wei Lin, Yunhong Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 23

ArenaRL: Scaling RL for Open-Ended Agents via Tournament-based Relative Ranking

arXiv:2601. 06487v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has substantially improved the performance of LLM agents on tasks with verifiable outcomes, but it still struggles on open-ended agent tasks with vast solution spaces (e.

By Qiang Zhang, Boli Chen, Fanrui Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Shihang Wang, Qiuchen Wang, Yinfeng Huang, Haonan Zhang, Rongxiang Zhu, Pengyong Wang, Ailin Ren, Xin Li, Pengjun Xie, Jiawei Liu, Ning Guo, Jingren Zhou, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Teaching Nemotron Greek: Mining a Corpus, Adapting Retrieval, and Grounding Generation for Modern Greek across Specialist Domains

arXiv:2608. 05138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Greek is absent from NVIDIA's Nemotron retrieval models and from major multilingual retrieval benchmarks, despite being important for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in legal, energy, financial, and medical applications.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos