Human mobility generation, an important task in urban research, synthesizes trajectory data for urban planning and transportation management.
Human mobility can be characterized as a "why-where-when" decision process: people form an intention to move and then determine where and when the corresponding activity will take place.
Trajectory generation under user-level and temporal distribution shifts may benefit from explicitly modeling this decision structure.
However, many existing human mobility generation methods either represent behavioral intent at a coarse granularity, such as a daily plan or a trajectory-level description, or directly predict future locations without explicitly reasoning about a possible motivation for each movement step.
We introduce MotiveMob, a motivation-driven autoregressive framework for human mobility generation that first forms a hypothesis about why the next movement may occur and then jointly generates where and when it may occur.
At each step, a motivation predictor conditions on the current mobility state, a long-term behavioral report, and the mobility history to infer a plausible motivation or determine whether the trajectory should terminate.
Given the hypothesized motivation, a state predictor grounds it in a candidate next location and arrival time.
The candidate then undergoes speed-feasibility and repetition checks before being fed back for the next decision.
We evaluate MotiveMob under distribution shifts involving unseen users and unseen temporal periods, including seasonal changes and the substantial behavioral disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experiments show that MotiveMob consistently achieves better distributional fidelity than competitive pretraining-based and prompting-based methods under user-level and temporal distribution shifts, demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution mobility patterns.