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NeurIPS 2025

RHYTHM: Reasoning with Hierarchical Temporal Tokenization for Human Mobility

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence ยท Machine Learning

Abstract

Predicting human mobility is inherently challenging due to complex long-range dependencies and multi-scale periodic behaviors. To address this, we introduce RHYTHM (Reasoning with Hierarchical Temporal Tokenization for Human Mobility), a unified framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) as general-purpose spatio-temporal predictors and trajectory reasoners. Methodologically, RHYTHM employs temporal tokenization to partition each trajectory into daily segments and encode them as discrete tokens with hierarchical attention that captures both daily and weekly dependencies, thereby quadratically reducing the sequence length while preserving cyclical information. Additionally, we enrich token representations by adding pre-computed prompt embeddings for trajectory segments and prediction targets via a frozen LLM, and feeding these combined embeddings back into the LLM backbone to capture complex interdependencies. Computationally, RHYTHM keeps the pretrained LLM backbone frozen, yielding faster training and lower memory usage. We evaluate our model against state-of-the-art methods using three real-world datasets. Notably, RHYTHM achieves a 2. 4% improvement in overall accuracy, a 5. 0% increase on weekends, and a 24. 6% reduction in training time. Code is publicly available at https: //github. com/he-h/rhythm.

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Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
1148781679121750540
v2026.09.13