MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08357v1
• Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:08:39 GMT
• Title: MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation
• Abstract summary: We introduce MobiDiff, an end-to-end discrete diffusion framework for synthetic mobility data generation.<n> MobiDiff decomposes each human check-in event into spatial, temporal channels, and employs structured event-, group-, and channel-level masking.<n>We evaluate generation fidelity, privacy-preserving, and efficiency on three large-scale real-world datasets from Atlanta, Boston, and Seattle.
• Score: 15.547763516860678
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Human mobility data are essential for transportation optimization, urban planning, and resource allocation, yet real-world mobility data are costly to collect and difficult to share due to privacy concerns. Recent diffusion-based methods have shown promise in synthesizing realistic mobility patterns, but they typically rely on continuous or latent spatio-temporal traces, limiting their ability to natively model discrete semantic events with explicit region, activity, time, and interval structures. To address this issue, we introduce MobiDiff, an end-to-end discrete diffusion framework that efficiently generates mobility data by directly denoising multi-channel semantic skeletons, avoiding the costly interpolation, latent trace construction, and coarse-to-fine realization pipelines widely used in existing diffusion-based methods. Specifically, MobiDiff decomposes each human check-in event into spatial, activity, and temporal channels, and employs structured event-, group-, and channel-level masking to jointly capture trajectory-level mobility patterns and within-event dependencies. We evaluate generation fidelity, privacy-preserving, and efficiency on three large-scale real-world datasets from Atlanta, Boston, and Seattle. Results show that MobiDiff effectively preserves trajectory length and temporal interval distributions while remaining competitive across broader mobility statistics; it is also much faster than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., 5.3$\times$ faster than GeoGen on average during inference. These findings suggest that discrete diffusion offers an interpretable and efficient framework for synthetic mobility data generation.

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