2026

Urban region representation learning plays a fundamental role in urban computing, providing compact embeddings that support a wide range of downstream analytical tasks. Existing methods are developed under a single-city setting and rely on continuous vector representations learned from city-specific spatiotemporal data. Learning transferable and semantically meaningful region representations in cross-city scenarios remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose URBAN-PROTOS, a two-stage framework for cross-city learning of urban region representations. We first abstract multi-city mobility data into discrete Urban Prototypes, which capture city-invariant spatiotemporal regularities from localized heterogeneous contexts. These prototypes serve as shared semantic units across cities and are further integrated into the semantic space of large language models through a prototype-guided alignment mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted demonstrate that URBAN-PROTOS consistently outperforms existing methods in cross-city transfer settings, while maintaining strong performance in single-city evaluations. Further analyses show that the learned region embeddings encode deep semantic regularities shared across cities, providing robust support for cross-city generalization.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong semantic reasoning and open-ended generation abilities, but aligning these abilities with structured sequential generation remains challenging. This challenge is particularly evident in out-of-town (OOT) POI sequence generation, where a model must infer transferable travel intent from a user’s hometown behaviors, adapt to cross-city interest drift, and generate a coherent destination trajectory under structural constraints. Existing approaches either rely on latent ID-based transfer with limited interpretability or directly use LLMs for sequence generation without explicitly grounding inferred semantics into position-aware predictions. To address this gap, we propose SemPOI-RL, a framework that aligns LLM semantic reasoning with structured sequence generation for interpretable OOT recommendation. Specifically, we first fine-tune an LLM to infer destination-oriented travel styles from users’ hometown trajectories, using natural language as an interpretable semantic intermediate. We then introduce a Semantic POI Alignment Module (SPAM) to ground these inferred styles into a style-conditioned masked autoencoder for position-aware trajectory generation. Finally, we apply reinforcement learning with recommendation-oriented rewards to align LLM-generated styles with downstream sequence quality. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that SemPOI-RL consistently outperforms both traditional recommenders and direct LLM baselines, while providing interpretable style attribution across different phases of a trip. The code is available at https://github.com/Wind-Flipped/SemPOI-RL.
Pricing automation in large-scale tourism is challenging because travel orders are highly unstructured, while pricing policies are complex, rapidly evolving, and inherently open-ended. Traditional rule engines are brittle and costly to maintain, whereas unconstrained LLM agents lack the reliability and auditability required for financial decisions. We present a production-grade LLM-powered pricing system with a strict decision boundary: LLMs perform structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection, while all numeric pricing, including total-price computation, is executed deterministically. Policies are compiled into interpretable condition trees, enabling open-ended support for new clauses and evolving rules without code changes, while exposing auditable artifacts for human-in-the-loop control. Periodic fine-tuning on logged traces further improves tree induction and path matching. Deployed at a municipal state-owned tourism enterprise across 7 scenic sites and 12 business categories with 1,500+ operators and 1,000+ active policies, the system processed 3,960 orders in six months, reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3, and cut per-order handling time from 10 minutes to <2 minutes.