Trajectory generative models: a survey from unconditional and conditional perspectives

Abstract Trajectories serve as a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, playing an important role in many applications such as traffic flow prediction, route planning, and urban management. However, the availability of such data is limited due to privacy issues, ethical concerns, and the high cost associated with infrastructure deployment. In recent years, rapidly developing generative models such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Diffusion Models (DMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in learning complex data distributions and generating synthetic data, thereby alleviating the data accessibility issue. In this survey, we systematically review the existing literature on deep generative models that address the problem of trajectory generation. First, we classify the existing literature into two categories: unconditional and conditional trajectory generation. In unconditional generation, trajectories are generated without contextual constraints, whereas conditional generation incorporates several important factors such as road network topology, time of day, and user preferences to guide the trajectory generation process. Then, for each category, we further classify the literature into three methodological types, including VAEs, GANs, and DMs, and analyze how these models address key challenges under different settings. Finally, we discuss promising directions for future research and hope to inspire further advances in trajectory generation.