# M-STAR: Multi-Scale Spatiotemporal Autoregression for Human Mobility Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07314/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [Follow Your Pose: Pose-Guided Text-to-Video Generation using Pose-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01186/) (2023)
- [Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09038/) (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)
- [Deep Gravity: enhancing mobility flows generation with deep neural networks and geographic information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00489/) (2020)
- [Diff-RNTraj: A Structure-aware Diffusion Model for Road Network-constrained Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07369/) (2024)
- [CARP: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06782/) (2024)
- [Pre-training General Trajectory Embeddings with Maximum Multi-view Entropy Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14539/) (2022)
- [COLA: Cross-city Mobility Transformer for Human Trajectory Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01801/) (2024)
- [Data-driven generation of spatio-temporal routines in human mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05952/) (2016)
- [E2S2: Encoding-Enhanced Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14912/) (2022)
- [Spatiotemporal-Augmented Graph Neural Networks for Human Mobility Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09381/) (2023)
- [Efficient Autoregressive Audio Modeling via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09027/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Synthetic Human Trajectories: Imitative Generation and Benchmarks Beyond Datasaurus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13790/) (2024)
- [Noise Matters: Diffusion Model-based Urban Mobility Generation with Collaborative Noise Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05000/) (2024)
- [The Effect of Recency to Human Mobility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01442/) (2015)
- [Spatial-Temporal Interplay in Human Mobility: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach with Hypergraph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15717/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling human mobility is vital for extensive applications such as transportation planning and epidemic modeling. With the rise of the Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) paradigm, recent works explore synthetic trajectory generation using autoregressive and diffusion models. While these methods show promise for generating single-day trajectories, they remain limited by inefficiencies in long-term generation (e.g., weekly trajectories) and a lack of explicit spatiotemporal multi-scale modeling. This study proposes Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal AutoRegression (M-STAR), a new framework that generates long-term trajectories through a coarse-to-fine spatiotemporal prediction process. M-STAR combines a Multi-scale Spatiotemporal Tokenizer that encodes hierarchical mobility patterns with a Transformer-based decoder for next-scale autoregressive prediction. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that M-STAR outperforms existing methods in fidelity and significantly improves generation speed. The data and codes are available at https://github.com/YuxiaoLuo0013/M-STAR.