Geo-Llama: Leveraging LLMs for Human Mobility Trajectory Generation with Constraints
Generating realistic human mobility data is essential for various application domains, including transportation, urban planning, and epidemic control, as real data is often inaccessible to researchers due to high costs and privacy concerns. Existing deep generative models learn from real trajectories to generate synthetic ones. Despite the progress, most of them suffer from training stability issues and scale poorly with increasing data size. More importantly, they often lack control mechanisms to guide the generated trajectories under constraints such as enforcing specific visits. To address these limitations, we formally define the controlled trajectory generation problem for effectively handling multiple spatiotemporal constraints. We introduce Geo-Llama, a novel LLM finetuning framework that can enforce multiple explicit visit constraints while maintaining contextual coherence of the generated trajectories. In this approach, pre-trained LLMs are fine-tuned on trajectory data with a visit-wise permutation strategy where each visit corresponds to a specific time and location. This strategy enables the model to capture spatiotemporal patterns regardless of visit orders while maintaining flexible and in-context constraint integration through prompts during generation. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of Geo-Llama, demonstrating its versatility and robustness in handling a broad range of constraints to generate more realistic trajectories compared to existing methods.
Authors
- Cyrus Shahabi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9118-0681)
- Trần Khánh Toàn (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5902-749X)
- John Krumm (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4394-6704)
- Lingyi Zhao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8544-3326)
- Li Xiong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7354-0428)
- Khurram Shafique (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3834-324X)
- Siyu Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2961-8655)
- Haowen Lin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4097-1907)
Institutions
- University of Southern California (US)
- Emory University (US)
- Novateur Research Solutions (United States) (US)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-06-02
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/mdm65600.2025.00023
- Citations
- 3
- Primary Topic
- Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 6.53
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province
- Discipline and Specialty, and Construction Foundation of Colleges and Universities of Guangdong Province
- Guangdong Province for Science and Technology Innovative Young Talents
- Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Green Processing of Natural Products and Product Safety
- Guangdong Province Introduction of Innovative R&D Team