ScaleTraj: Scale-Decomposed Human Trajectory Generation

Abstract

Individual-level trajectories are essential for applications that rely on user-level mobility behavior. Existing mobility-generation approaches face a fundamental tension between individual-level and population-level statistical fidelity: top-down models reproduce aggregate mobility statistics but struggle to guarantee realistic individual trajectories, while bottom-up generators synthesize individual trajectories yet often fail to preserve key population-level mobility regularities after aggregation. In particular, many bottom-up generated populations fail to reproduce the displacement distribution, whose heavy tail is well summarized by a truncated power law. We formalize this phenomenon as the \textbf{Population-Level Displacement Gap}. To investigate its prevalence, we conduct a systematic evaluation of representative model-driven and data-driven trajectory generators. Our results provide evidence that the Population-Level Displacement Gap is prevalent across diverse generation paradigms. To diagnose this gap, we introduce the \textbf{Scale Fidelity Profile (SFP)}, a scale-decomposed metric that quantifies discrepancies in trip allocations across spatial scales. SFP indicates that population-level displacement mismatches co-occur with systematic errors in how trips are allocated across spatial scales. Motivated by this observation, we develop \textbf{ScaleTraj}, an autoregressive Transformer that decomposes location prediction into a Scale Selection Head that decides the movement scale and a Scale-Aware Cell Selection Head that predicts the destination conditioned on the selected scale. Experiments on two datasets show that ScaleTraj reduces the Population-Level Displacement Gap versus model-driven and data-driven baselines, while preserving fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCU-TrustworthyAI/ScaleTraj.