Accurate prediction of evacuation behavior is critical for disaster preparedness, yet models trained in one region often fail elsewhere. Using a multi-state hurricane evacuation survey, we show this failure goes beyond feature distribution shift: households with similar characteristics follow systematically different decision patterns across states. As a result, single global models overfit dominant responses, misrepresent vulnerable subpopulations, and generalize poorly across locations. We propose Population-Adaptive Symbolic Mixture-of-Experts (PASM), which pairs large language model guided symbolic regression with a mixture-of-experts architecture. PASM discovers human-readable closed-form decision rules, specializes them to data-driven subpopulations, and routes each input to the appropriate expert at inference time. On Hurricanes Harvey and Irma data, transferring from Florida and Texas to Georgia with 100 calibration samples, PASM achieves a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.607, compared to XGBoost (0.404), TabPFN (0.333), GPT-5-mini (0.434), and meta-learning baselines MAML and Prototypical Networks (MCC ≤ 0.346). The routing mechanism assigns distinct formula archetypes to subpopulations, so the resulting behavioral profiles are directly interpretable. A fairness audit across four demographic axes finds no statistically significant disparities after Bonferroni correction. PASM closes more than half the cross-location generalization gap while keeping decision rules transparent enough for real-world emergency planning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Evacuation probability difference in UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) space: P(Evac∣Georgia)−P(Evac∣Florida) (left) and P(Evac∣Georgia)−P(Evac∣Texas) (right).
Figure 2: Overview of the PASM framework.
Model
MCC
ROC-AUC
Accuracy
XGBoost
0.404
0.680
0.692
TabPFN
0.333
0.751
0.654
GPT-5-mini(medium)
0.434
0.692
0.692
PASM
0.607
0.840
0.769
Table 1: Cross-location adaptation performance in Georgia.
Method
MCC
ROC-AUC
Accuracy
Matching Networks
0.280 ± 0.117
0.732 ± 0.096
0.589 ± 0.045
MAML
0.314 ± 0.158
0.753 ± 0.061
0.631 ± 0.071
Prototypical Networks
0.313 ± 0.162
0.763 ± 0.092
0.650 ± 0.078
HierClust+LR
0.346 ± 0.164
0.746 ± 0.100
0.635 ± 0.071
PASM (Ours)
0.607
0.840
0.769
Table 2: Comparison with meta-learning and heterogeneity-aware baselines.
Method
MCC
ROC-AUC
Accuracy
Top-1 Average
0.234
0.766
0.615
Top-5 Average
0.548
0.769
0.731
No SR (LR + Router)
0.434
0.752
0.731
PASM
0.607
0.840
0.769
Table 3: Ablation on aggregation strategy.
Coefficient Strategy
MCC
ROC-AUC
Accuracy
Fixed Coefficients
0.389
0.763
0.692
Learnable (Static)
0.365
0.828
0.654
PASM (Full)
0.607
0.840
0.769
Table 4: Ablation on coefficient adaptation strategy.
Figure 3: Cross-state transferability: models trained on Florida and evaluated on Florida (intra-state) vs. Georgia/Texas (cross-state).
Florida
Georgia
Texas
Model
MCC
AUC
Accuracy
MCC
AUC
Accuracy
MCC
AUC
Accuracy
GPT-5-mini
.736
.867
.867
.571
.791
.787
.736
.867
.867
TabPFN
.757 ± .046
.962 ± .009
.877 ± .023
.313 ± .067
.773 ± .018
.678 ± .026
.717 ± .055
.953 ± .012
.854 ± .030
XGBoost
.729 ± .040
.944 ± .017
.864 ± .020
.325 ± .076
.719 ± .029
.686 ± .034
.714 ± .040
.927 ± .016
.855 ± .021
Table 5: Cross-state transfer performance when training on Florida (100 shots) and testing on each state.
Model
Train → Test
MCC
AUC
Accuracy
GPT-5-mini
FL → FL
.736
.867
.867
FL → GA
.571
.791
.787
GA → GA
.295
.691
.795
TabPFN
FL → FL
.757 ± .046
.962 ± .009
.877 ± .023
FL → GA
.313 ± .067
.773 ± .018
.678 ± .026
GA → GA
.274 ± .101
.763 ± .066
.729 ± .037
Table 6: Within-state heterogeneity analysis (100 training shots).
Table 8: Cluster profiles showing routed expert formulas, demographic characteristics, and behavioral interpretations. Three formula archetypes emerge: (A) linear additive (C0 only), (B) geographic rate vs. log-age (C3,4,5,6,9), and (C) multi-factor with cosine and root transforms (C1,2,7,8).
Metric
Value
Threshold
Adjusted Rand Index (ARI)
0.876
> 0.8 (strong)
Normalized Mutual Information (NMI)
0.916
> 0.8 (high)
Co-clustering Jaccard
0.822
> 0.75 (reliable)
Cluster count (mode)
8
range [6,11]
Noise fraction
0.020
—
Table 9: Clustering stability metrics for Experiment A (20 runs with varying UMAP random state, fixed data split).
Agent-based modeling (ABM) has the capability to model millions of individuals and their interactions, which is useful for policy making. However, ABMs have traditionally relied on static prior, which prevents the models from adapting to real-time changes. Our research provides a novel approach to addressing this information gap. Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to predict human decision-making. Here, we introduce a scalable Hybrid Agent-based and Language-driven Epidemic (HALE) modeling framework that leverages LLMs to predict human decision-making in an ABM simulation. As a proof-of-concept, we use HALE to simulate COVID-19 and its effects in Salt Lake County, UT.
Sifat Afroj Moon, Dakotah Maguire, Adam Spannaus +5
Oak Ridge National Laboratory · Computational Science and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA · Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA +1
Human mobility prediction is a critical task but remains challenging due to its complexity and variability across populations and regions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made progress in zero-shot prediction, but existing methods suffer from limited interpretability (due to black-box reasoning), lack of iterative learning from new data, and poor transferability. In this paper, we introduce ARMove, a fully transferable framework for predicting human mobility through agentic reasoning. To address these limitations, ARMove employs standardized feature management with iterative optimization and user-specific customization: four major feature pools for foundational knowledge, user profiles for segmentation, and an automated generation mechanism integrating LLM knowledge. Robust generalization is achieved via agentic decision-making that adjusts feature weights to maximize accuracy while providing interpretable decision paths. Finally, large-small model synergy distills strategies from large LLMs (e.g., 72B) to smaller ones (e.g., 7B), reducing costs and enhancing performance ceilings. Extensive experiments on four global datasets show ARMove outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on 6 out of 12 metrics (gains of 0.78% to 10.47%), with transferability tests confirming robustness across regions, users, and scales. The other 4 items also achieved suboptimal results. Transferability tests confirm its 19 robustness across regions, user groups, and model scales, while interpretability 20 analysis highlights its transparency in decision-making. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARMove-F847.
Complex cognitive, emotional, and social processes shape human evacuations during natural disasters. Accurate modeling and understanding of human behavior in disasters or emergencies can greatly impact the evacuation process by informing more effective planning and resource allocation. However, collecting human data in these situations is very difficult, and existing computational evacuation models assume rational, homogeneous behavior, leading to unrealistic, overly optimistic predictions. To address this gap, we present a simulation framework of sequential human decision-making during an evacuation scenario, introducing cognitively grounded, persona-driven agents. Our framework models evacuation behavior in a grid-based urban environment that evolves over time, capturing fire and other hazards. Human agents are modeled as personas that make sequential decisions in response to environmental stimuli with cognition structured in three levels: high-level evacuation goals, mid-level route reasoning, and low-level navigation. Decision-making is driven by large language models (LLMs) coupled with a cognitive module and calibrated with empirical human evacuation data. We propose a dynamic, stimulus-driven disaster simulation framework that models human evacuation decision-making using persona-conditioned LLM agents and a cognitive hierarchy.