Think over Trajectories: Leveraging Video Generation to Reconstruct GPS Trajectories from Cellular Signaling

TL;DR

This paper introduces Sig2GPS, a novel approach that uses video generation techniques to reconstruct high-precision GPS trajectories from coarse cellular signaling data, improving accuracy and transferability.

Contribution

Reframes GPS trajectory reconstruction as an image-to-video generation task, leveraging a new dataset and reinforcement learning for enhanced fidelity and scalability.

Findings

Significant accuracy improvements over baselines.

Effective cross-city transferability demonstrated.

Scalable to large real-world datasets.

Abstract

Mobile devices continuously interact with cellular base stations, generating massive volumes of signaling records that provide broad coverage for understanding human mobility. However, such records offer only coarse location cues (e.g., serving-cell identifiers) and therefore limit their direct use in applications that require high-precision GPS trajectories. This paper studies the Sig2GPS problem: reconstructing GPS trajectories from cellular signaling. Inspired by domain experts often lay the signaling trace on the map and sketch the corresponding GPS route, unlike conventional solutions that rely on complex multi-stage engineering pipelines or regress coordinates, Sig2GPS is reframed as an image-to-video generation task that directly operates in the map-visual domain: signaling traces are rendered on a map, and a video generation model is trained to draw a continuous GPS path. To support this paradigm, a paired signaling-to-trajectory video dataset is constructed to fine-tune an open-source video model, and a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning-based optimization method is introduced to improve generation fidelity via rewards. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show substantial improvements over strong engineered and learning-based baselines, while additional results on next GPS prediction indicate scalability and cross-city transferability. Overall, these results suggest that map-visual video generation provides a practical interface for trajectory data mining by enabling direct generation and refinement of continuous paths under map constraints.