# MobilityGPT: Enhanced Human Mobility Modeling with a GPT model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning for Human Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02825/) (2020)
- [DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11582/) (2023)
- [LSTM-TrajGAN: A Deep Learning Approach to Trajectory Privacy Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10521/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Trajectory Data Management, Analytics, and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11547/) (2020)
- [Continuous Trajectory Generation Based on Two-Stage GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07103/) (2023)
- [Human mobility is well described by closed-form gravity-like models learned automatically from data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11281/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Exploring the Roles of Large Language Models in Reshaping Transportation Systems: A Survey, Framework, and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21411/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Mobility Analysis in Transportation Systems: A Survey on Forecasting Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02357/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Location Hierarchy Learning for Long-Tailed Mobility Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19965/) (2025)
- [A Short Survey of Human Mobility Prediction in Epidemic Modeling from Transformers to LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16921/) (2024)
- [Independent Mobility GPT (IDM-GPT): A Self-Supervised Multi-Agent Large Language Model Framework for Customized Traffic Mobility Analysis Using Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18652/) (2025)
- [Urban Computing in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02009/) (2025)
- [MobQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Semantic Understanding of Human Mobility Data through Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11163/) (2025)
- [TrajGPT-R: Generating Urban Mobility Trajectory with Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20643/) (2026)
- [TraXion: Rethinking Pre-training Frameworks for Mobility and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06906/) (2026)
- [Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12542/) (2026)
- [Industrial Kinematic Trajectory Model (IKTM): Coordinate-Free Autoregressive Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22173/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models have shown promising results in capturing human mobility characteristics and generating synthetic trajectories. However, it remains challenging to ensure that the generated geospatial mobility data is semantically realistic, including consistent location sequences, and reflects real-world characteristics, such as constraining on geospatial limits. We reformat human mobility modeling as an autoregressive generation task to address these issues, leveraging the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture. To ensure its controllable generation to alleviate the above challenges, we propose a geospatially-aware generative model, MobilityGPT. We propose a gravity-based sampling method to train a transformer for semantic sequence similarity. Then, we constrained the training process via a road connectivity matrix that provides the connectivity of sequences in trajectory generation, thereby keeping generated trajectories in geospatial limits. Lastly, we proposed to construct a preference dataset for fine-tuning MobilityGPT via Reinforcement Learning from Trajectory Feedback (RLTF) mechanism, which minimizes the travel distance between training and the synthetically generated trajectories. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate MobilityGPT's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in generating high-quality mobility trajectories that are closest to real data in terms of origin-destination similarity, trip length, travel radius, link, and gravity distributions. We release the source code and reference links to datasets at https://github.com/ammarhydr/MobilityGPT.