aiqbench analysis
This paper introduces MR-Traj, a multi-resolution diffusion framework designed to generate synthetic human mobility data while preserving privacy by reducing linkage risks. By explicitly modeling trajectories as coarse milestones combined with fine-grained segments, the method captures complex spatiotemporal dependencies essential for urban applications like traffic management and epidemic control. The approach outperforms existing techniques in generating diverse patterns that satisfy both global distribution constraints and high-resolution utility requirements without relying on large-scale public datasets.
Coarse-to-Fine Multi-Resolution Diffusion Models for Trajectory Generation in Urban Systems
arXiv:2608.14570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding human mobility is critical for a wide range of urban applications, including traffic management, epidemic control, and urban planning. However, due to privacy concerns, the availability of large-scale public trajectory data remains limited, posing challenges for downstream mobility analysis. Existing methods for synthetic trajectory generation primarily focus on matching global distribution similarity, while often overlooking mobility patterns across different spatial and temporal resolutions that are essential for practical utility. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-resolution diffusion framework, MR-Traj, for large-scale trajectory generation. MR-Traj explicitly models trajectories as compositions of coarse-grained milestones and fine-grained segments, enabling the capture of complex spatial-temporal dependencies at multiple resolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that MR-Traj achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods in terms of global distribution similarity, while consistently outperforming them in modeling fine-resolution mobility patterns and supporting downstream urban mobility tasks. In addition, by introducing stochasticity at multiple resolution levels, MR-Traj generates more diverse trajectories, which empirically reduces trajectory linkage risk under a seed-guided data release setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ray0202/MR-Traj.
Abstract:Understanding human mobility is critical for a wide range of urban applications, including traffic management, epidemic control, and urban planning. However, due to privacy concerns, the availability of large-scale public trajectory data remains limited, posing challenges for downstream mobility analysis. Existing methods for synthetic trajectory generation primarily focus on matching global distribution similarity, while often overlooking mobility patterns across different spatial and temporal resolutions that are essential for practical utility. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-resolution diffusion framework, MR-Traj, for large-scale trajectory generation. MR-Traj explicitly models trajectories as compositions of coarse-grained milestones and fine-grained segments, enabling the capture of complex spatial-temporal dependencies at multiple resolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that MR-Traj achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods in terms of global distribution similarity, while consistently outperforming them in modeling fine-resolution mobility patterns and supporting downstream urban mobility tasks. In addition, by introducing stochasticity at multiple resolution levels, MR-Traj generates more diverse trajectories, which empirically reduces trajectory linkage risk under a seed-guided data release setting. Our code is available at this https URL.
12 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to KDD 2026
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.14570 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.14570v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14570 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
https://doi.org/10.1145/3770855.3818889 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources
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