Learning Multi-Modal Mobility Dynamics for Generalized Next Location Recommendation
This work addresses the challenge of predicting human mobility for applications like location recommendations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-modal methods by incorporating spatial-temporal dynamics.
The paper tackles the problem of limited generalization in human mobility prediction for location recommendation by leveraging multi-modal spatial-temporal knowledge, achieving consistent improvements and significant generalization ability in both normal and abnormal scenarios across six public datasets.
The precise prediction of human mobility has produced significant socioeconomic impacts, such as location recommendations and evacuation suggestions. However, existing methods suffer from limited generalization capability: unimodal approaches are constrained by data sparsity and inherent biases, while multi-modal methods struggle to effectively capture mobility dynamics caused by the semantic gap between static multi-modal representation and spatial-temporal dynamics. Therefore, we leverage multi-modal spatial-temporal knowledge to characterize mobility dynamics for the location recommendation task, dubbed as \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{M}odal \textbf{Mob}ility (\textbf{M}$^3$\textbf{ob}). First, we construct a unified spatial-temporal relational graph (STRG) for multi-modal representation, by leveraging the functional semantics and spatial-temporal knowledge captured by the large language models (LLMs)-enhanced spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG). Second, we design a gating mechanism to fuse spatial-temporal graph representations of different modalities, and propose an STKG-guided cross-modal alignment to inject spatial-temporal dynamic knowledge into the static image modality. Extensive experiments on six public datasets show that our proposed method not only achieves consistent improvements in normal scenarios but also exhibits significant generalization ability in abnormal scenarios.