Location representations provide mobility models with fundamental information about the spatial position, functional characteristics, and relationships of places. However, existing embeddings are often dependent on mobility observations, unable to represent unseen locations, and weakly constrained to retain geographic distance. This limits their reuse across datasets and mobility tasks. To address these limitations, we propose LE4Mob, an inductive, distance-aware, and geography-derived location embedding framework for mobility modelling. LE4Mob extends contrastive language-location pre-training while introducing a distance-aware regularisation objective that encourages the embedding space to preserve spatial relationships. Pre-trained from geographic context, LE4Mob can encode rich spatial-semantic information and generate embeddings for unseen locations inductively. Its independence from downstream mobility task supervision also makes it transferable across different mobility tasks. We evaluate LE4Mob on individual-level next location prediction and population-level commuter flow generation. Experiments across multiple datasets and study areas show that LE4Mob outperforms strong baselines, with particular advantages in inductive settings and when downstream models rely directly on interactions between location embeddings. These findings demonstrate the potential of distance-aware, geography-derived location representations as reusable foundations for human mobility modelling.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Framework of LE4Mob. (a) In the pre-training phase, batches of POIs are encoded through a dual-stream architecture that aligns coordinate-based location embeddings with POI-derived textual semantics using contrastive learning, while a distance-preserving loss regularises sampled location pairs to retain geographic distance information. (b) After pre-training, the frozen location encoder generates embeddings for downstream mobility tasks, including individual-level next location prediction and population-level flow generation.
FSQ-NYC
FSQ-TKY
Gowalla-LD
Geolife
#Users
535
1643
68
39
#Days tracked
319
318
367
1703
#Total unique locations
4019
6959
1065
1248
#Stays per user
178.3±206.1
225.1±220.9
127.1±123.3
358.6±383.6
#Stays per user per day
2.1±2.1
2.7±2.7
2.4±3.0
2.4±1.5
#Unique locations per user
34.7±21.4
56.6±33.5
46.3±44.2
61.5±52.8
TABLE I: Basic statistics of the mobility datasets after preprocessing. The mean and standard deviation across users are reported.
Conventional
Inductive
Data
Model
Acc@1 ↑
Acc@5 ↑
nDCG@10 ↑
GDE@1 ↓
mGDE@5 ↓
Acc@1 ↑
Acc@5 ↑
nDCG@10 ↑
GDE@1 ↓
mGDE@5 ↓
FSQ-NYC
Vanilla-E2E
19.94 ± 0.19
46.84 ± 0.44
37.52 ± 0.25
4.45 ± 0.09
5.36 ± 0.10
9.80 ± 1.18
24.41 ± 2.10
19.23 ± 1.93
7.53 ± 0.75
8.47 ± 0.69
Skip-gram
19.81 ± 0.34
45.76 ± 0.19
36.85 ± 0.29
4.43 ± 0.06
5.20 ± 0.03
8.68 ± 1.19
21.71 ± 2.92
17.35 ± 2.40
8.07 ± 0.82
8.96 ± 1.15
POI2Vec
19.62 ± 0.58
44.94 ± 0.71
36.32 ± 0.66
4.53 ± 0.16
5.38 ± 0.12
8.84 ± 1.31
21.80 ± 3.40
17.37 ± 2.70
8.26 ± 0.73
8.74 ± 0.72
Geo-Teaser
19.43 ± 0.73
45.46 ± 0.84
36.48 ± 0.59
4.52 ± 0.08
5.30 ± 0.08
8.08 ± 1.47
20.33 ± 3.13
16.16 ± 2.74
8.77 ± 0.48
9.26 ± 0.61
TALE
20.20 ± 0.40
45.80 ± 0.12
36.98 ± 0.12
4.46 ± 0.06
5.35 ± 0.05
8.52 ± 1.47
21.04 ± 3.41
16.83 ± 2.76
8.23 ± 0.99
9.07 ± 0.99
TABLE II: Performance comparison of different embedding methods on the next location prediction task. The best and second-best performance are marked in bold and underlined , respectively, based on the unrounded mean values. For better readability, the ranking metric values are scaled by a factor of 102 , while GDE and mGDE are reported in kilometres.
DeepGravity
Bilinear
Data
Model
CPC ↑
MAE ↓
RMSE ↓
JSD ↓
CPC ↑
MAE ↓
RMSE ↓
JSD ↓
Manchester
Handcrafted
0.765 ± 0.008
0.693 ± 0.055
0.871 ± 0.083
0.202 ± 0.005
0.757 ± 0.011
0.717 ± 0.063
0.915 ± 0.091
0.207 ± 0.008
LDA
0.784 ± 0.017
0.649 ± 0.080
0.835 ± 0.116
0.183 ± 0.013
0.769 ± 0.021
0.694 ± 0.095
0.904 ± 0.142
0.192 ± 0.019
SPPE
0.778 ± 0.012
0.669 ± 0.066
0.866 ± 0.097
0.189 ± 0.009
0.796 ± 0.009
0.610 ± 0.058
0.795 ± 0.089
0.173 ± 0.006
Urban2Vec
0.769 ± 0.017
0.693 ± 0.083
0.895 ± 0.119
0.196 ± 0.014
0.809 ± 0.017
0.584 ± 0.078
0.793 ± 0.109
0.157 ± 0.012
Space2Vec
0.764 ± 0.016
0.705 ± 0.080
0.903 ± 0.116
0.199 ± 0.013
0.783 ± 0.022
0.660 ± 0.095
0.892 ± 0.140
0.183 ± 0.019
TABLE III: Performance comparison of different embedding methods on the flow generation task. The best and second-best performances are determined using unrounded mean values and marked in bold and underlined , respectively.
Model
Pearson’s r
Spearman’s ρ
CaLLiPer
0.268
0.315
LE4Mob
0.369
0.438
TABLE IV: Correspondence between geographic similarity and embedding cosine similarity for OA pairs in the Greater London test set. All correlations are statistically significant at p<0.0001 .
Fig. 2: Flow generation performance with and without explicit distance inputs in the downstream DeepGravity model. Error bars indicate standard deviations across repeated runs. Percentages denote the relative CPC change after removing the explicit distance feature. HC, U2V, S2V, and CaL denote Hand-Crafted, Urban2Vec, Space2Vec, and CaLLiPer, respectively.
Predicting a user's next POI is a task in human mobility modeling, yet LLM-based approaches focus on semantic reasoning from previous mobility records, while neglecting real-world spatial context. However, human mobility is inherently shaped by spatial cognition, including geographic distance and neighborhood context. This issue is further compounded by prior evidence that LLMs often struggle with spatial reasoning tasks, including distance estimation and geographically biased prediction. To address these limitations, we propose our framework, a multi-agent LLM framework that decomposes next-POI prediction into three stages: Firstly, a Pattern Extraction Agent that captures temporal and categorical mobility patterns from trajectory history; Secondly, a Spatial Reasoning Agent that structures candidate activity choices by combining behavioral preferences with real-world spatial constraints, including geographic distance, road network distance, and neighborhood affiliation; and Thirdly, a Decision Synthesis Agent that integrates behavioral patterns and spatial reasoning for final prediction. Experiments on the NYC benchmark dataset with two LLM backbones show improvements over baseline methods, with up to 493% Hit@1 improvement and 37% relative improvement in Hit@5. Ablations show that combining neighborhood affiliation with distance-based features generally outperforms distance-only settings, and that the Spatial Reasoning Agent plays a crucial role in final prediction by integrating behavioral preferences with real-world spatial constraints, especially for smaller models. Overall, the results highlight the importance of spatial reasoning in mobility prediction. Accurate next-POI prediction requires combining behavioral patterns with explicit real-world spatial constraints, and multi-agent decomposition provides an effective structure for organizing these forms of context.
Shangyu Lou, Ziqi Cui
University of California & Santa Barbara & San Diego State University California, USA · Politecnico di Milano Milan, Italy
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.
Individual-level mobility prediction is central to urban simulation, transportation planning, and policy analysis. Supervised sequence models achieve strong accuracy but require task-specific training and offer limited decision-level transparency. Recent LLM-based methods improve interpretability, yet mostly rely on static prompts and single-pass inference, limiting their ability to seek additional evidence when mobility signals are weak or conflicting. We propose \method{}, a training-free LLM-driven agent framework that formulates next-location prediction as adaptive evidence-controlled decision making. \method{} resolves routine cases through a fast path based on historical regularity, while ambiguous cases trigger iterative tool use over recent trajectories, historical behavior, stay-move likelihood, and geographical evidence. Across three mobility datasets, AgentMob achieves the strongest overall performance among training-free LLM-based methods, with GPT-5.4 reaching 71.42% Acc@1 on BW, 33.14% on YJMob100K, and 33.50% on Shanghai ISP. On BW non-fast-path cases, the LLM controller improves Acc@1 from 30.65% to 48.62% over a same-tool statistical baseline, showing that its main benefit lies in resolving ambiguous predictions through adaptive evidence gathering. Our code is available at https://github.com/Unknown-zoo/AgentMob.
Linyao Chen, Qinlao Zhao, Zechen Li +7
The University of Tokyo · Huazhong University of Science and Technology · University of New South Wales, Sydney +3