TravelBehaviorQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Behavioral Interpretation of GPS Trajectories

Abstract

GPS trajectories encode rich behavioral information about how people move, organize activities, and form daily routines. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise a natural question: can such models infer and summarize travel behavior directly from mobility traces? This paper introduces Travel-BehaviorQA , a large-scale benchmark dataset that reframes trajectory analysis as a language-based behavioral understanding task. The dataset links raw GPS trajectories with human-grounded question-answering (QA) pairs that capture travel intensity, temporal structure, activity patterns, mode usage, and behavioral routines. Unlike prior mobility datasets focused on prediction or classification, TravelBehaviorQA emphasizes semantic interpretation through a unified mix of deterministic and open-ended questions. In this benchmark, we construct over 143k QA instances spanning users and years, and evaluate a broad range of state-of-the-art LLMs under controlled settings. Our results reveal substantial gaps between factual extraction and genuine behavioral reasoning, showing that model scale alone is insufficient and that trajectory representation is a primary bottleneck. TravelBehaviorQA exposes critical limitations of current models and establishes a rigorous benchmark for advancing language-based understanding of human mobility behavior. The dataset is available at https://github.com/