UniMove: A Unified Model for Multi-city Human Mobility Prediction
This addresses the challenge of heterogeneous mobility patterns in urban planning and transportation optimization, representing an incremental advancement toward a foundational model for human mobility.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting human mobility across multiple cities by proposing UniMove, a unified model that improves prediction accuracy by over 10.2% through joint training on multi-city data with mutual data enhancement.
Human mobility prediction is vital for urban planning, transportation optimization, and personalized services. However, the inherent randomness, non-uniform time intervals, and complex patterns of human mobility, compounded by the heterogeneity introduced by varying city structures, infrastructure, and population densities, present significant challenges in modeling. Existing solutions often require training separate models for each city due to distinct spatial representations and geographic coverage. In this paper, we propose UniMove, a unified model for multi-city human mobility prediction, addressing two challenges: (1) constructing universal spatial representations for effective token sharing across cities, and (2) modeling heterogeneous mobility patterns from varying city characteristics. We propose a trajectory-location dual-tower architecture, with a location tower for universal spatial encoding and a trajectory tower for sequential mobility modeling. We also design MoE Transformer blocks to adaptively select experts to handle diverse movement patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets from diverse cities demonstrate that UniMove truly embodies the essence of a unified model. By enabling joint training on multi-city data with mutual data enhancement, it significantly improves mobility prediction accuracy by over 10.2\%. UniMove represents a key advancement toward realizing a true foundational model with a unified architecture for human mobility. We release the implementation at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UniMove/.