The paper introduces Nomad, a transfer-and-ground framework for generating human mobility trajectories without target-city trajectory data. It learns relative transitions from source cities using POI attributes and then grounds these transitions onto a target city’s POI map via a behavior graph and exploration–return walk. Experiments across ten cities show Nomad improves trajectory fidelity and downstream utility by roughly 15% and 3% respectively over adaptation baselines.
By Yidi Wang, Yunhe Zhang, Bangchao Deng, Dingqi Yang, Pengyang Wang
arXiv:2603.05581v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Urban traffic flow is governed by the complex, nonlinear interaction between land use configuration and spatiotemporally heterogeneous mobili...
By Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov
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
PlacePulse is a structural geospatial foundation model that transforms 572 attributes—expanded to 2,288 through H3 neighborhood aggregates—into 256‑dimensional unit‑norm embeddings for over a million H3 resolution‑7 cells across the United States. The model achieves high intrinsic reconstruction quality (mean $R^2 = 0.853$) and strong spatial organization (Moran's $I = 0.93$), while outperforming a dimensionality‑matched baseline on 74 held‑out targets from 12 external sources and competing with Google’s Population Dynamics Foundation Model on various health, economic, election, mobility, and social‑vulnerability outcomes. These results demonstrate that static structural composition can serve as a distinct and complementary modality for geospatial foundation models.
By Luc\'ia Garc\'ia-Duarte, Miguel \'Alvarez, Diego Vicente, Javier P\'erez Trufero, Javier de la Torre
arXiv:2405. 17468v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human mobility plays a crucial role in transportation, urban planning, and public health, but current approaches face important limitations.
By Xishun Liao, Qinhua Jiang, Brian Yueshuai He, Yifan Liu, Chenchen Kuai, Jiaqi Ma
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
MoRAX is a lightweight framework that augments geospatial foundation model embeddings with functional structure derived from human mobility data. By incorporating mobility flows, MoRAX preserves the coverage and consistency of existing geospatial models while adding information about functional connectivity among urban regions, enabling zero‑shot deployment in unseen cities. Experiments across four cities in two countries show that the MoRAX teacher model outperforms baseline geospatial models on eight socioeconomic and environmental prediction tasks, and the student model—without direct mobility input—approaches the teacher’s performance.
By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Yulun Zhou, Alec Kirkley
arXiv:2510. 06473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding and modeling human mobility is central to challenges in transport planning, sustainable urban design, and public health.
By Ye Hong, Yatao Zhang, Konrad Schindler, Martin Raubal
arXiv:2606. 09086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations.
By Jie Zhao, Xianqi Dai, Jie Feng, Huandong Wang, Yong Li
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
MoRA is a human‑centric geospatial representation learning framework that uses a large mobility graph as its backbone to fuse spatial tokenization, graph neural networks, and asymmetric contrastive learning. It aligns over 100 million points of interest, massive remote sensing imagery, and structured demographic data with a billion‑edge mobility graph, producing compact 128‑dimensional embeddings that capture socio‑economic context and functional roles of locations. On a benchmark of nine downstream social and economic prediction tasks, MoRA outperforms state‑of‑the‑art models by an average of 12.9% and demonstrates scaling behavior analogous to large language models.
By Ya Wen, Jixuan Cai, Qiyao Ma, Linyan Li, Xinhua Chen, Chris Webster, Yulun Zhou
arXiv:2606. 31207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid advance of smart cities increasingly depends on trajectory data mining, yet underrepresented demographic groups, particularly the elderly, are often sparsely represented in public mobility datasets.
By Zhengxuan Wang, Haohan He, Mengying Zhou