# Multimodal Trajectory Representation Learning for Travel Time Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05840/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2025.

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

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01890/) (2016)
- [DeepSense: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Time-Series Mobile Sensing Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01942/) (2016)
- [Multi-timescale Trajectory Prediction for Abnormal Human Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04321/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Jointly Contrastive Representation Learning on Road Network and Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06389/) (2022)
- [A Simple Baseline for Travel Time Estimation using Large-Scale Trip Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.08580/) (2015)
- [More Than Routing: Joint GPS and Route Modeling for Refine Trajectory Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16915/) (2024)
- [Grid and Road Expressions Are Complementary for Trajectory Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14768/) (2024)
- [DutyTTE: Deciphering Uncertainty in Origin-Destination Travel Time Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12809/) (2024)
- [GARLIC: GPT-Augmented Reinforcement Learning with Intelligent Control for Vehicle Dispatching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10286/) (2024)
- [SPOT-Trip: Dual-Preference Driven Out-of-Town Trip Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01705/) (2025)
- [Learning Generalized and Flexible Trajectory Models from Omni-Semantic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17437/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate travel time estimation (TTE) plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. However, it remains challenging due to heterogeneous data sources and complex traffic dynamics. Moreover, traditional approaches typically convert trajectory data into fixed-length representations. This overlooks the inherent variability of real-world motion patterns, often resulting in information loss and redundancy. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Multimodal Dynamic Trajectory Integration (MDTI) framework--a novel multimodal trajectory representation learning approach that integrates GPS sequences, grid trajectories, and road network constraints to enhance the performance of TTE. MDTI employs modality-specific encoders and a multimodal fusion module to capture complementary spatial, temporal, and topological semantics, while a dynamic trajectory modeling mechanism adaptively regulates information density for trajectories of varying lengths. Two self-supervised pretraining objectives, named contrastive alignment and masked language modeling, further strengthen multimodal consistency and contextual understanding. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MDTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming its robustness and strong generalization abilities. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/City-Computing/MDTI.