# TrajCogn: Leveraging LLMs for Cognizing Movement Patterns and Travel Purposes from Trajectories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12459 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12459/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [PTR: Prompt Tuning with Rules for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11259/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01432/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15950/) (2023)
- [UrbanGPT: Spatio-Temporal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00813/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Trajectory Representation Learning with Temporal Regularities and Travel Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09510/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Trajectory Similarity Learning with Dual-Feature Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05155/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Path Representation Learning with Curriculum Negative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09373/) (2021)
- [Frozen Transformers in Language Models Are Effective Visual Encoder Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12973/) (2023)
- [LightPath: Lightweight and Scalable Path Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10171/) (2023)
- [Deep Spatially and Temporally Aware Similarity Computation for Road Network Constrained Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09339/) (2021)
- [Pre-training General Trajectory Embeddings with Maximum Multi-view Entropy Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14539/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Traj-MLLM: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Reform Trajectory Data Mining?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00053/) (2025)
- [Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Foundation Model - Recent Advances and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20729/) (2025)
- [TrajMamba: An Efficient and Semantic-rich Vehicle Trajectory Pre-training Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17545/) (2025)
- [Capturing Context-Aware Route Choice Semantics for Trajectory Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14819/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal trajectories are crucial in various data mining tasks. It is important to develop a versatile trajectory learning method that performs different tasks with high accuracy. This involves effectively extracting two core aspects of information--movement patterns and travel purposes--from trajectories. However, this is challenging due to limitations in model capacity and the quality and scale of trajectory datasets. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in versatility by training on large-scale, high-quality datasets. Given the similarities between trajectories and sentences, there's potential to leverage LLMs to develop an effective trajectory learning method. However, standard LLMs are not designed to handle the unique spatio-temporal features of trajectories and cannot extract movement patterns and travel purposes. To address these challenges, we propose a model called TrajCogn that effectively utilizes LLMs to model trajectories. TrajCogn leverages the strengths of LLMs to create a versatile trajectory learning approach while addressing the limitations of standard LLMs. First, TrajCogn incorporates a novel trajectory semantic embedder that enables LLMs to process spatio-temporal features and extract movement patterns and travel purposes. Second, TrajCogn introduces a new trajectory prompt that integrates these patterns and purposes into LLMs, allowing the model to adapt to various tasks. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and two representative tasks demonstrate that TrajCogn successfully achieves its design goals. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrajCogn-5021.