# Think over Trajectories: Leveraging Video Generation to Reconstruct GPS Trajectories from Cellular Signaling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26610 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26610/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [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)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20328/) (2025)
- [GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05242/) (2026)
- [STAN: Spatio-Temporal Attention Network for Next Location Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04095/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models as Urban Residents: An LLM Agent Framework for Personal Mobility Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14744/) (2024)
- [AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13986/) (2024)
- [DenseGRPO: From Sparse to Dense Reward for Flow Matching Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20218/) (2026)
- [Traj-MLLM: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Reform Trajectory Data Mining?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00053/) (2025)
- [Eyes Will Shut: A Vision-Based Next GPS Location Prediction Model by Reinforcement Learning from Visual Map Feed Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18661/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mobile devices continuously interact with cellular base stations, generating massive volumes of signaling records that provide broad coverage for understanding human mobility. However, such records offer only coarse location cues (e.g., serving-cell identifiers) and therefore limit their direct use in applications that require high-precision GPS trajectories. This paper studies the Sig2GPS problem: reconstructing GPS trajectories from cellular signaling. Inspired by domain experts often lay the signaling trace on the map and sketch the corresponding GPS route, unlike conventional solutions that rely on complex multi-stage engineering pipelines or regress coordinates, Sig2GPS is reframed as an image-to-video generation task that directly operates in the map-visual domain: signaling traces are rendered on a map, and a video generation model is trained to draw a continuous GPS path. To support this paradigm, a paired signaling-to-trajectory video dataset is constructed to fine-tune an open-source video model, and a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning-based optimization method is introduced to improve generation fidelity via rewards. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show substantial improvements over strong engineered and learning-based baselines, while additional results on next GPS prediction indicate scalability and cross-city transferability. Overall, these results suggest that map-visual video generation provides a practical interface for trajectory data mining by enabling direct generation and refinement of continuous paths under map constraints.
