Origin-Destination (OD) flow matrices are critical for urban mobility analysis, supporting traffic forecasting, infrastructure planning, and policy design. Existing methods face two key limitations: (1) reliance on costly auxiliary features (e.g., Points of Interest, socioeconomic statistics) with limited spatial coverage, and (2) fragility to spatial topology changes, where reordering urban regions disrupts the structural coherence of generated flows. We propose Sat2Flow, a structure-aware diffusion framework that generates structurally coherent OD flows using only satellite imagery. Our approach employs a multi-kernel encoder to capture diverse regional interactions and a permutation-aware diffusion process that maintains consistency across regional orderings. Through joint contrastive training linking satellite features with OD patterns and equivariant diffusion training enforcing structural invariance, Sat2Flow ensures topological robustness under arbitrary regional reindexing. Experiments on real-world datasets show that Sat2Flow outperforms physics-based and data-driven baselines in accuracy while preserving flow distributions and spatial structures under index permutations. Sat2Flow offers a globally scalable solution for OD flow generation in data-scarce environments, eliminating region-specific auxiliary data dependencies while maintaining structural robustness for reliable mobility modeling.

The success of foundation models in language has inspired a new wave of general-purpose models for human mobility. However, existing approaches struggle to scale effectively due to two fundamental limitations: a failure to use meaningful basic units to represent movement, and an inability to capture the vast diversity of patterns found in large-scale data. In this work, we develop MoveGPT, a large-scale foundation model specifically architected to overcome these barriers. MoveGPT is built upon two key innovations: (1) a unified location encoder that maps geographically disjoint locations into a shared semantic space, enabling pre-training on a global scale; and (2) a Spatially-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Transformer that develops specialized experts to efficiently capture diverse mobility patterns. Pre-trained on billion-scale datasets, MoveGPT establishes a new state-of-the-art across a wide range of downstream tasks, achieving performance gains of up to 35% on average. It also demonstrates strong generalization capabilities to unseen cities. Crucially, our work provides empirical evidence of scaling ability in human mobility, validating a clear path toward building increasingly capable foundation models in this domain.

Urban morphology has long been recognized as a factor shaping human mobility, yet comparative and formal classifications of urban form across metropolitan areas remain limited. Building on theoretical principles of urban structure and advances in unsupervised learning, we systematically classified the built environment of nine U.S. metropolitan areas using structural indicators such as density, connectivity, and spatial configuration. The resulting morphological types were linked to mobility patterns through descriptive statistics, marginal effects estimation, and post hoc statistical testing. Here we show that distinct urban forms are systematically associated with different mobility behaviors, such as reticular morphologies being linked to significantly higher public transport use (marginal effect = 0.49) and reduced car dependence (-0.41), while organic forms are associated with increased car usage (0.44), and substantial declines in public transport (-0.47) and active mobility (-0.30). These effects are statistically robust (p < 1e-19), highlighting that the spatial configuration of urban areas plays a fundamental role in shaping transportation choices. Our findings extend previous work by offering a reproducible framework for classifying urban form and demonstrate the added value of morphological analysis in comparative urban research. These results suggest that urban form should be treated as a key variable in mobility planning and provide empirical support for incorporating spatial typologies into sustainable urban policy design.

Human mobility generation in disaster scenarios plays a vital role in resource allocation, emergency response, and rescue coordination. During disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, human mobility patterns often deviate from their normal states, which makes the task more challenging. However, existing works usually rely on limited data from a single city or specific disaster, significantly restricting the model's generalization capability in new scenarios. In fact, disasters are highly sudden and unpredictable, and any city may encounter new types of disasters without prior experience. Therefore, we aim to develop a one-for-all model for mobility generation that can generalize to new disaster scenarios. However, building a universal framework faces two key challenges: 1) the diversity of disaster types and 2) the heterogeneity among different cities. In this work, we propose a unified model for human mobility generation in natural disasters (named UniDisMob). To enable cross-disaster generalization, we design physics-informed prompt and physics-guided alignment that leverage the underlying common patterns in mobility changes after different disasters to guide the generation process. To achieve cross-city generalization, we introduce a meta-learning framework that extracts universal patterns across multiple cities through shared parameters and captures city-specific features via private parameters. Extensive experiments across multiple cities and disaster scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average performance improvement exceeding 13%.

Understanding urban human mobility patterns at various spatial levels is essential for social science. This study presents a machine learning framework to downscale origin-destination (OD) taxi trips flows in New York City from a larger spatial unit to a smaller spatial unit. First, correlations between OD trips and demographic, socioeconomic, and commuting characteristics are developed using four models: Linear Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Neural Networks (NN). Second, a perturbation-based sensitivity analysis is applied to interpret variable importance for nonlinear models. The results show that the linear regression model failed to capture the complex variable interactions. While NN performs best with the training and testing datasets, SVM shows the best generalization ability in downscaling performance. The methodology presented in this study provides both analytical advancement and practical applications to improve transportation services and urban development.

Mobility Foundation Models (MFMs) have advanced the modeling of human movement patterns, yet they face a ceiling due to limitations in data scale and semantic understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer powerful semantic reasoning, they lack the innate understanding of spatio-temporal statistics required for generating physically plausible mobility trajectories. To address these gaps, we propose MoveFM-R, a novel framework that unlocks the full potential of mobility foundation models by leveraging language-driven semantic reasoning capabilities. It tackles two key challenges: the vocabulary mismatch between continuous geographic coordinates and discrete language tokens, and the representation gap between the latent vectors of MFMs and the semantic world of LLMs. MoveFM-R is built on three core innovations: a semantically enhanced location encoding to bridge the geography-language gap, a progressive curriculum to align the LLM's reasoning with mobility patterns, and an interactive self-reflection mechanism for conditional trajectory generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoveFM-R significantly outperforms existing MFM-based and LLM-based baselines. It also shows robust generalization in zero-shot settings and excels at generating realistic trajectories from natural language instructions. By synthesizing the statistical power of MFMs with the deep semantic understanding of LLMs, MoveFM-R pioneers a new paradigm that enables a more comprehensive, interpretable, and powerful modeling of human mobility. The implementation of MoveFM-R is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MoveFM-R-CDE7/.

Trajectory-user linking (TUL) aims to associate anonymized trajectories with the users who generated them, which is crucial for personalized recommendations, privacy-preserving analytics, and secure location-based services. Existing methods struggle with sparse data, incomplete routes, and limited modeling of complex spatial dependencies, often relying on low-level check-in data or ignoring spatial patterns. In this paper, we introduced GCN-TULHOR, a method that transforms raw location data into higher-order mobility flow representations using hexagonal tessellation, reducing data sparsity and capturing richer spatial semantics, and integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). Our approach converts both sparse check-in and continuous GPS trajectory data into unified higher-order flow representations, mitigating sparsity while capturing deeper semantic information. The GCN layer explicitly models complex spatial relationships and non-local dependencies without requiring side information such as timestamps or points of interest. Experiments on six real-world datasets show consistent improvements over classical baselines, RNN- and Transformer-based models, and the TULHOR method in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. GCN-TULHOR achieves 1-8% relative gains in accuracy and F1. Sensitivity analysis identifies an optimal setup with a single GCN layer and 512-dimensional embeddings. The integration of GCNs enhances spatial learning and improves generalizability across mobility data. This work highlights the value of combining graph-based spatial learning with sequential modeling, offering a robust and scalable solution for TUL with applications in recommendations, urban planning, and security.

Abstract--Next location prediction is a key task in human mobility analysis, crucial for applications like smart city resource allocation and personalized navigation services. However, existing methods face two significant challenges: first, they fail to address the dynamic imbalance between periodic and chaotic mobile patterns, leading to inadequate adaptation over sparse trajectories; second, they underutilize contextual cues, such as temporal regularities in arrival times, which persist even in chaotic patterns and offer stronger predictability than spatial forecasts due to reduced search spaces. T o tackle these challenges, we propose CANOE, a C hA otic N eural O scillator nE twork for next location prediction, which introduces a biologically inspired Chaotic Neural Oscillatory Attention mechanism to inject adaptive variability into traditional attention, enabling balanced representation of evolving mobility behaviors, and employs a T ri-Pair Interaction Encoder along with a Cross Context Attentive Decoder to fuse multimodal "who-when-where" contexts in a joint framework for enhanced prediction performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that CANOE consistently and significantly outperforms a sizeable collection of state-of-the-art baselines, yielding 3.17%-13.11% In particular, CANOE can make robust predictions over mobility trajectories of different mobility chaotic levels. A series of ablation studies also supports our key design choices. Next location prediction is a critical yet challenging task in human mobility modeling, serving as a fundamental building block for various location-based services [1]-[11]. Its core objective is to predict the specific location a user is most likely to visit next, based on the user's historical trajectory data.

Human mobility regularity is crucial for understanding urban dynamics and informing decision-making processes. This study first quantifies the periodicity in complex human mobility data as a sparse identification of dominant positive auto-correlations in time series autoregression and then discovers periodic patterns. We apply the framework to large-scale metro passenger flow data in Hangzhou, China and multi-modal mobility data in New York City and Chicago, USA, revealing the interpretable weekly periodicity across different spatial locations over past several years. The analysis of ridesharing data from 2019 to 2024 demonstrates the disruptive impact of the pandemic on mobility regularity and the subsequent recovery trends. In 2024, the periodic mobility patterns of ridesharing, taxi, subway, and bikesharing in Manhattan uncover the regularity and variability of these travel modes. Our findings highlight the potential of interpretable machine learning to discover spatiotemporal mobility patterns and offer a valuable tool for understanding urban systems.

-- This paper addresses a critical gap in urban mobility modeling by focusing on shift workers, a population segment comprising 15-20% of the workforce in industrialized societies yet systematically underrepresented in traditional transportation surveys and planning. This underrepresentation is revealed in this study by a comparative analysis of GPS and survey data, highlighting stark differences between the bimodal temporal patterns of shift workers and the conventional 9-to-5 schedules recorded in surveys. T o address this bias, we introduce a novel transformer-based approach that leverages fragmented GPS trajectory data to generate complete, behaviorally valid activity patterns for individuals working non-standard hours. Our method employs periodaware temporal embeddings and a transition-focused loss function specifically designed to capture the unique activity rhythms of shift workers and mitigate the inherent biases in conventional transportation datasets. Evaluation shows that the generated data achieves remarkable distributional alignment with GPS data from Los Angeles County (A verage JSD < 0.02 for all evaluation metrics). By transforming incomplete GPS traces into complete, representative activity patterns, our approach provides transportation planners with a powerful data augmentation tool to fill critical gaps in understanding the 24/7 mobility needs of urban populations, enabling precise and inclusive transportation planning.