TransLLM: A Unified Multi-Task Large Language Model for Urban Transportation via Learnable Prompting

Jiaming Leng, Yunying Bi, Chuan Qin, Zhenya Huang, Bing Yin, Haojie Ren, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang


Abstract
Urban transportation systems require precise modeling of dynamic spatiotemporal patterns across diverse tasks, such as traffic forecasting, electric vehicle (EV) charging demand prediction, and taxi dispatch. Existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: traditional deep learning models are task-specific and lack generalization capabilities, whereas Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with structured spatiotemporal data and numerical reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose TransLLM, a unified multi-task framework that synergizes spatiotemporal encoding with LLM reasoning through learnable prompt composition. To enable LLMs to perceive complex graph dependencies, we design a noise-augmented spatiotemporal encoder that projects structured signals into the LLM’s embedding space. Furthermore, to overcome the rigidity of fixed prompt templates in heterogeneous traffic scenarios, we introduce an instance-level prompt routing mechanism trained via reinforcement learning. The framework operates by encoding spatiotemporal patterns into contextual representations, dynamically composing personalized prompts to guide LLM reasoning, and projecting the resulting representations through specialized output layers to generate task-specific predictions. Experiments on seven datasets and three tasks demonstrate that TransLLM outperforms many baselines, showing superior adaptability in both supervised and zero-shot settings with excellent generalization and robustness. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/lengjiaming/TransLLM.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1195
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
26028–26042
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1195/
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Cite (ACL):
Jiaming Leng, Yunying Bi, Chuan Qin, Zhenya Huang, Bing Yin, Haojie Ren, Yanyong Zhang, and Chao Wang. 2026. TransLLM: A Unified Multi-Task Large Language Model for Urban Transportation via Learnable Prompting. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 26028–26042, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TransLLM: A Unified Multi-Task Large Language Model for Urban Transportation via Learnable Prompting (Leng et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1195.pdf
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