SEMINT: an LLM-empowered long-term vessel trajectory prediction framework

In the rapidly evolving global shipping industry, accurate vessel trajectory prediction is essential for effective maritime traffic management. However, the inherent uncertainties in vessel voyages pose significant challenges for existing methods in achieving precise long-term predictions. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, we propose SEMINT—a novel framework that integrates SEMantic cognition and INTent context-awareness for long-term vessel trajectory prediction. SEMINT leverages LLMs to semantically interpret vessel navigation behaviors and infer multiple voyage intents. The final intent inference is derived from the consensus among multiple reasoning chains, which are then combined with historical preferences to form an intent context. Guided by this context, a Transformer-based trajectory prediction model captures the dependencies between critical waypoints and voyage intent, thereby achieving stable long-term numerical predictions. SEMINT combines the advantages of LLMs and task-specific deep learning models, transforming voyage uncertainties into high-level intent diversity and simplifying the learning process for long-term movement patterns. Experiments on real-world datasets show that SEMINT outperforms previous methods, reducing average and final displacement errors by 28.47% and 31.59%, respectively.