Mobility-Embedded POIs: Learning What A Place Is and How It Is Used from Human Movement

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Siampou, Maria Despoina, Choudhury, Shushman, Hsu, Shang-Ling, Arora, Neha, Shahabi, Cyrus
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Siampou, Maria Despoina
Choudhury, Shushman
Hsu, Shang-Ling
Arora, Neha
Shahabi, Cyrus
author_facet Siampou, Maria Despoina
Choudhury, Shushman
Hsu, Shang-Ling
Arora, Neha
Shahabi, Cyrus
contents Recent progress in geospatial foundation models highlights the importance of learning general-purpose representations for real-world locations, particularly points-of-interest (POIs) where human activity concentrates. Existing approaches, however, focus primarily on place identity derived from static textual metadata, or learn representations tied to trajectory context, which capture movement regularities rather than how places are actually used (i.e., POI's function). We argue that POI function is a missing but essential signal for general POI representations. We introduce Mobility-Embedded POIs (ME-POIs), a framework that augments POI embeddings derived, from language models with large-scale human mobility data to learn POI-centric, context-independent representations grounded in real-world usage. ME-POIs encodes individual visits as temporally contextualized embeddings and aligns them with learnable POI representations via contrastive learning to capture usage patterns across users and time. To address long-tail sparsity, we propose a novel mechanism that propagates temporal visit patterns from nearby, frequently visited POIs across multiple spatial scales. We evaluate ME-POIs on five newly proposed map enrichment tasks, testing its ability to capture both the identity and function of POIs. Across all tasks, augmenting text-based embeddings with ME-POIs consistently outperforms both text-only and mobility-only baselines. Notably, ME-POIs trained on mobility data alone can surpass text-only models on certain tasks, highlighting that POI function is a critical component of accurate and generalizable POI representations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mobility-Embedded POIs: Learning What A Place Is and How It Is Used from Human Movement
Siampou, Maria Despoina
Choudhury, Shushman
Hsu, Shang-Ling
Arora, Neha
Shahabi, Cyrus
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent progress in geospatial foundation models highlights the importance of learning general-purpose representations for real-world locations, particularly points-of-interest (POIs) where human activity concentrates. Existing approaches, however, focus primarily on place identity derived from static textual metadata, or learn representations tied to trajectory context, which capture movement regularities rather than how places are actually used (i.e., POI's function). We argue that POI function is a missing but essential signal for general POI representations. We introduce Mobility-Embedded POIs (ME-POIs), a framework that augments POI embeddings derived, from language models with large-scale human mobility data to learn POI-centric, context-independent representations grounded in real-world usage. ME-POIs encodes individual visits as temporally contextualized embeddings and aligns them with learnable POI representations via contrastive learning to capture usage patterns across users and time. To address long-tail sparsity, we propose a novel mechanism that propagates temporal visit patterns from nearby, frequently visited POIs across multiple spatial scales. We evaluate ME-POIs on five newly proposed map enrichment tasks, testing its ability to capture both the identity and function of POIs. Across all tasks, augmenting text-based embeddings with ME-POIs consistently outperforms both text-only and mobility-only baselines. Notably, ME-POIs trained on mobility data alone can surpass text-only models on certain tasks, highlighting that POI function is a critical component of accurate and generalizable POI representations.
title Mobility-Embedded POIs: Learning What A Place Is and How It Is Used from Human Movement
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21149