mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

A Survey on Deep Learning for Human Mobility

arXiv 2012.02825 ↗First posted 4 Dec 2020cs.LG cs.AI cs.SIcited by 87

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Abstract (arXiv)

The study of human mobility is crucial due to its impact on several aspects of our society, such as disease spreading, urban planning, well-being, pollution, and more. The proliferation of digital mobility data, such as phone records, GPS traces, and social media posts, combined with the predictive power of artificial intelligence, triggered the application of deep learning to human mobility. Existing surveys focus on single tasks, data sources, mechanistic or traditional machine learning approaches, while a comprehensive description of deep learning solutions is missing. This survey provides a taxonomy of mobility tasks, a discussion on the challenges related to each task and how deep learning may overcome the limitations of traditional models, a description of the most relevant solutions to the mobility tasks described above and the relevant challenges for the future. Our survey is a guide to the leading deep learning solutions to next-location prediction, crowd flow prediction, trajectory generation, and flow generation. At the same time, it helps deep learning scientists and practitioners understand the fundamental concepts and the open challenges of the study of human mobility.

Key facts. Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 12; 2023: 11; 2024: 26; 2025: 23; 2026: 13.

87 papers.

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  1. 2024Large Language Models as Urban Residents: An LLM Agent Framework for Personal Mobility Generationcited by 99
  2. 2023On the Opportunities and Challenges of Foundation Models for Geospatial Artificial Intelligencecited by 88
  3. 2024UrbanGPT: Spatio-Temporal Large Language Modelscited by 81
  4. 2023DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelcited by 64
  5. 2024ControlTraj: Controllable Trajectory Generation with Topology-Constrained Diffusion Modelcited by 48
  6. 2023Continuous Trajectory Generation Based on Two-Stage GANcited by 36
  7. 2023Human-AI Coevolutioncited by 27
  8. 2024Trajectory Data Management and Mining: A Survey from Deep Learning to the LLM Eracited by 23
  9. 2024Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Next Location Predictorscited by 22
  10. 2022Context-aware multi-head self-attentional neural network model for next location predictioncited by 20
  11. 2024Chain-of-Planned-Behaviour Workflow Elicits Few-Shot Mobility Generation in LLMscited by 18
  12. 2024UniTraj: Learning a Universal Trajectory Foundation Model from Billion-Scale Worldwide Tracescited by 18
38 more
  1. 2024Large Language Models for Mobility Analysis in Transportation Systems: A Survey on Forecasting Taskscited by 16
  2. 2022How do you go where? Improving next location prediction by learning travel mode information using transformerscited by 12
  3. 2024MobilityGPT: Enhanced Human Mobility Modeling with a GPT modelcited by 11
  4. 2024Deep Activity Model: A Generative Approach for Human Mobility Pattern Synthesiscited by 10
  5. 2025Enhancing Large Language Models for Mobility Analytics with Semantic Location Tokenizationcited by 8
  6. 2024Leveraging Generative AI for Urban Digital Twins: A Scoping Review on the Autonomous Generation of Urban Data, Scenarios, Designs, and 3D City Models for Smart City Advancementcited by 7
  7. 2024ST-MoE-BERT: A Spatial-Temporal Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Long-Term Cross-City Mobility Predictioncited by 7
  8. 2024Noise Matters: Diffusion Model-based Urban Mobility Generation with Collaborative Noise Priorscited by 7
  9. 2022Vision Paper: Causal Inference for Interpretable and Robust Machine Learning in Mobility Analysiscited by 6
  10. 2023CATS: Conditional Adversarial Trajectory Synthesis for Privacy-Preserving Trajectory Data Publication Using Deep Learning Approachescited by 6
  11. 2024Human Mobility Modeling with Household Coordination Activities under Limited Information via Retrieval-Augmented LLMscited by 6
  12. 2025Learning Universal Human Mobility Patterns with a Foundation Model for Cross-domain Data Fusioncited by 6
  13. 2022Generating Synthetic Mobility Networks with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 5
  14. 2024Enhancing Global Maritime Traffic Network Forecasting with Gravity-Inspired Deep Learning Modelscited by 5
  15. 2024TravelAgent: Generative Agents in the Built Environmentcited by 5
  16. 2024UniTE: A Survey and Unified Pipeline for Pre-training Spatiotemporal Trajectory Embeddingscited by 4
  17. 2025Into the Unknown: Applying Inductive Spatial-Semantic Location Embeddings for Predicting Individuals' Mobility Beyond Visited Placescited by 4
  18. 2022Unfolding AIS transmission behavior for vessel movement modeling on noisy data leveraging machine learningcited by 3
  19. 2022Trajectory Test-Train Overlap in Next-Location Prediction Datasetscited by 3
  20. 2022Emotion Analysis using Multi-Layered Networks for Graphical Representation of Tweetscited by 3
  21. 2022Privacy-Aware Human Mobility Prediction via Adversarial Networkscited by 2
  22. 2022Differentially Private Multivariate Time Series Forecasting of Aggregated Human Mobility With Deep Learning: Input or Gradient Perturbation?cited by 2
  23. 2022Privacy-Aware Adversarial Network in Human Mobility Predictioncited by 2
  24. 2023Visual Crowd Analysis: Open Research Problemscited by 2
  25. 2024Unified Occupancy on a Public Transport Network through Combination of AFC and APC Datacited by 2
  26. 2024A Short Survey of Human Mobility Prediction in Epidemic Modeling from Transformers to LLMscited by 2
  27. 2024HRNet: Differentially Private Hierarchical and Multi-Resolution Network for Human Mobility Data Synthesizationcited by 2
  28. 2024Back to Bayesics: Uncovering Human Mobility Distributions and Anomalies with an Integrated Statistical and Neural Frameworkcited by 2
  29. 2024ReeFRAME: Reeb Graph based Trajectory Analysis Framework to Capture Top-Down and Bottom-Up Patterns of Lifecited by 2
  30. 2025Towards Physics-informed Diffusion for Anomaly Detection in Trajectoriescited by 2
  31. 2025UniMove: A Unified Model for Multi-city Human Mobility Predictioncited by 2
  32. 2022Enhancing crowd flow prediction in various spatial and temporal granularitiescited by 1
  33. 2022IMAP: Individual huMAn mobility Patterns visualizing platformcited by 1
  34. 2023Analysing Fairness of Privacy-Utility Mobility Modelscited by 1
  35. 2023Generating Individual Trajectories Using GPT-2 Trained from Scratch on Encoded Spatiotemporal Datacited by 1
  36. 2023A causal intervention framework for synthesizing mobility data and evaluating predictive neural networkscited by 1
  37. 2024Predicting Next Useful Location With Context-Awareness: The State-Of-The-Artcited by 1
  38. 2024Context-Aware Automated Passenger Counting Data Denoisingcited by 1

50 most cited of 87 All 87 (JSON)