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Length-Aware Adversarial Training for Variable-Length Trajectories: Digital Twins for Mall Shopper Paths

Machine Learning 2026-01-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We study generative modeling of \emph{variable-length trajectories} -- sequences of visited locations/items with associated timestamps -- for downstream simulation and counterfactual analysis. A recurring practical issue is that standard mini-batch training can be unstable when trajectory lengths are highly heterogeneous, which in turn degrades \emph{distribution matching} for trajectory-derived statistics. We propose \textbf{length-aware sampling (LAS)}, a simple batching strategy that groups trajectories by length and samples batches from a single length bucket, reducing within-batch length heterogeneity (and making updates more consistent) without changing the model class. We integrate LAS into a conditional trajectory GAN with auxiliary time-alignment losses and provide (i) a distribution-level guarantee for derived variables under mild boundedness assumptions, and (ii) an IPM/Wasserstein mechanism explaining why LAS improves distribution matching by removing length-only shortcut critics and targeting within-bucket discrepancies. Empirically, LAS consistently improves matching of derived-variable distributions on a multi-mall dataset of shopper trajectories and on diverse public sequence datasets (GPS, education, e-commerce, and movies), outperforming random sampling across dataset-specific metrics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.01663,
  title  = {Length-Aware Adversarial Training for Variable-Length Trajectories: Digital Twins for Mall Shopper Paths},
  author = {He Sun and Jiwoong Shin and Ravi Dhar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.01663},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:50:08.308Z