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SubscribeA Robust Deep Networks based Multi-Object MultiCamera Tracking System for City Scale Traffic
Vision sensors are becoming more important in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for traffic monitoring, management, and optimization as the number of network cameras continues to rise. However, manual object tracking and matching across multiple non-overlapping cameras pose significant challenges in city-scale urban traffic scenarios. These challenges include handling diverse vehicle attributes, occlusions, illumination variations, shadows, and varying video resolutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and cost-effective deep learning-based framework for Multi-Object Multi-Camera Tracking (MO-MCT). The proposed framework utilizes Mask R-CNN for object detection and employs Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to select target objects from overlapping detections. Transfer learning is employed for re-identification, enabling the association and generation of vehicle tracklets across multiple cameras. Moreover, we leverage appropriate loss functions and distance measures to handle occlusion, illumination, and shadow challenges. The final solution identification module performs feature extraction using ResNet-152 coupled with Deep SORT based vehicle tracking. The proposed framework is evaluated on the 5th AI City Challenge dataset (Track 3), comprising 46 camera feeds. Among these 46 camera streams, 40 are used for model training and validation, while the remaining six are utilized for model testing. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with an IDF1 score of 0.8289, and precision and recall scores of 0.9026 and 0.8527 respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in robust and accurate vehicle tracking.
Multi-Source Urban Traffic Flow Forecasting with Drone and Loop Detector Data
Traffic forecasting is a fundamental task in transportation research, however the scope of current research has mainly focused on a single data modality of loop detectors. Recently, the advances in Artificial Intelligence and drone technologies have made possible novel solutions for efficient, accurate and flexible aerial observations of urban traffic. As a promising traffic monitoring approach, drone-captured data can create an accurate multi-sensor mobility observatory for large-scale urban networks, when combined with existing infrastructure. Therefore, this paper investigates the problem of multi-source traffic speed prediction, simultaneously using drone and loop detector data. A simple yet effective graph-based model HiMSNet is proposed to integrate multiple data modalities and learn spatio-temporal correlations. Detailed analysis shows that predicting accurate segment-level speed is more challenging than the regional speed, especially under high-demand scenarios with heavier congestions and varying traffic dynamics. Utilizing both drone and loop detector data, the prediction accuracy can be improved compared to single-modality cases, when the sensors have lower coverages and are subject to noise. Our simulation study based on vehicle trajectories in a real urban road network has highlighted the added value of integrating drones in traffic forecasting and monitoring.
MamNet: A Novel Hybrid Model for Time-Series Forecasting and Frequency Pattern Analysis in Network Traffic
The abnormal fluctuations in network traffic may indicate potential security threats or system failures. Therefore, efficient network traffic prediction and anomaly detection methods are crucial for network security and traffic management. This paper proposes a novel network traffic prediction and anomaly detection model, MamNet, which integrates time-domain modeling and frequency-domain feature extraction. The model first captures the long-term dependencies of network traffic through the Mamba module (time-domain modeling), and then identifies periodic fluctuations in the traffic using Fourier Transform (frequency-domain feature extraction). In the feature fusion layer, multi-scale information is integrated to enhance the model's ability to detect network traffic anomalies. Experiments conducted on the UNSW-NB15 and CAIDA datasets demonstrate that MamNet outperforms several recent mainstream models in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1-Score. Specifically, it achieves an improvement of approximately 2% to 4% in detection performance for complex traffic patterns and long-term trend detection. The results indicate that MamNet effectively captures anomalies in network traffic across different time scales and is suitable for anomaly detection tasks in network security and traffic management. Future work could further optimize the model structure by incorporating external network event information, thereby improving the model's adaptability and stability in complex network environments.
EMDFNet: Efficient Multi-scale and Diverse Feature Network for Traffic Sign Detection
The detection of small objects, particularly traffic signs, is a critical subtask within object detection and autonomous driving. Despite the notable achievements in previous research, two primary challenges persist. Firstly, the main issue is the singleness of feature extraction. Secondly, the detection process fails to effectively integrate with objects of varying sizes or scales. These issues are also prevalent in generic object detection. Motivated by these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel object detection network named Efficient Multi-scale and Diverse Feature Network (EMDFNet) for traffic sign detection that integrates an Augmented Shortcut Module and an Efficient Hybrid Encoder to address the aforementioned issues simultaneously. Specifically, the Augmented Shortcut Module utilizes multiple branches to integrate various spatial semantic information and channel semantic information, thereby enhancing feature diversity. The Efficient Hybrid Encoder utilizes global feature fusion and local feature interaction based on various features to generate distinctive classification features by integrating feature information in an adaptable manner. Extensive experiments on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K) benchmark and the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) demonstrate that our EMDFNet outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors in performance while retaining the real-time processing capabilities of single-stage models. This substantiates the effectiveness of EMDFNet in detecting small traffic signs.
CityFlow: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Large Scale City Traffic Scenario
Traffic signal control is an emerging application scenario for reinforcement learning. Besides being as an important problem that affects people's daily life in commuting, traffic signal control poses its unique challenges for reinforcement learning in terms of adapting to dynamic traffic environment and coordinating thousands of agents including vehicles and pedestrians. A key factor in the success of modern reinforcement learning relies on a good simulator to generate a large number of data samples for learning. The most commonly used open-source traffic simulator SUMO is, however, not scalable to large road network and large traffic flow, which hinders the study of reinforcement learning on traffic scenarios. This motivates us to create a new traffic simulator CityFlow with fundamentally optimized data structures and efficient algorithms. CityFlow can support flexible definitions for road network and traffic flow based on synthetic and real-world data. It also provides user-friendly interface for reinforcement learning. Most importantly, CityFlow is more than twenty times faster than SUMO and is capable of supporting city-wide traffic simulation with an interactive render for monitoring. Besides traffic signal control, CityFlow could serve as the base for other transportation studies and can create new possibilities to test machine learning methods in the intelligent transportation domain.
Efficient Traffic-Sign Recognition with Scale-aware CNN
The paper presents a Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) system, which can fast and accurately recognize traffic signs of different sizes in images. The system consists of two well-designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), one for region proposals of traffic signs and one for classification of each region. In the proposal CNN, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) with a dual multi-scale architecture is proposed to achieve scale invariant detection. In training the proposal network, a modified "Online Hard Example Mining" (OHEM) scheme is adopted to suppress false positives. The classification network fuses multi-scale features as representation and adopts an "Inception" module for efficiency. We evaluate the proposed TSR system and its components with extensive experiments. Our method obtains 99.88% precision and 96.61% recall on the Swedish Traffic Signs Dataset (STSD), higher than state-of-the-art methods. Besides, our system is faster and more lightweight than state-of-the-art deep learning networks for traffic sign recognition.
YOLO-TS: Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection with Enhanced Accuracy Using Optimized Receptive Fields and Anchor-Free Fusion
Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.
Virtual Nodes Improve Long-term Traffic Prediction
Effective traffic prediction is a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, enabling precise forecasts of traffic flow, speed, and congestion. While traditional spatio-temporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) have achieved notable success in short-term traffic forecasting, their performance in long-term predictions remains limited. This challenge arises from over-squashing problem, where bottlenecks and limited receptive fields restrict information flow and hinder the modeling of global dependencies. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel framework that incorporates virtual nodes, which are additional nodes added to the graph and connected to existing nodes, in order to aggregate information across the entire graph within a single GNN layer. Our proposed model incorporates virtual nodes by constructing a semi-adaptive adjacency matrix. This matrix integrates distance-based and adaptive adjacency matrices, allowing the model to leverage geographical information while also learning task-specific features from data. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of virtual nodes significantly enhances long-term prediction accuracy while also improving layer-wise sensitivity to mitigate the over-squashing problem. Virtual nodes also offer enhanced explainability by focusing on key intersections and high-traffic areas, as shown by the visualization of their adjacency matrix weights on road network heat maps. Our advanced approach enhances the understanding and management of urban traffic systems, making it particularly well-suited for real-world applications.
Domain Adversarial Spatial-Temporal Network: A Transferable Framework for Short-term Traffic Forecasting across Cities
Accurate real-time traffic forecast is critical for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and it serves as the cornerstone of various smart mobility applications. Though this research area is dominated by deep learning, recent studies indicate that the accuracy improvement by developing new model structures is becoming marginal. Instead, we envision that the improvement can be achieved by transferring the "forecasting-related knowledge" across cities with different data distributions and network topologies. To this end, this paper aims to propose a novel transferable traffic forecasting framework: Domain Adversarial Spatial-Temporal Network (DASTNet). DASTNet is pre-trained on multiple source networks and fine-tuned with the target network's traffic data. Specifically, we leverage the graph representation learning and adversarial domain adaptation techniques to learn the domain-invariant node embeddings, which are further incorporated to model the temporal traffic data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ adversarial multi-domain adaptation for network-wide traffic forecasting problems. DASTNet consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art baseline methods on three benchmark datasets. The trained DASTNet is applied to Hong Kong's new traffic detectors, and accurate traffic predictions can be delivered immediately (within one day) when the detector is available. Overall, this study suggests an alternative to enhance the traffic forecasting methods and provides practical implications for cities lacking historical traffic data.
Self-Regulating Cars: Automating Traffic Control in Free Flow Road Networks
Free-flow road networks, such as suburban highways, are increasingly experiencing traffic congestion due to growing commuter inflow and limited infrastructure. Traditional control mechanisms, such as traffic signals or local heuristics, are ineffective or infeasible in these high-speed, signal-free environments. We introduce self-regulating cars, a reinforcement learning-based traffic control protocol that dynamically modulates vehicle speeds to optimize throughput and prevent congestion, without requiring new physical infrastructure. Our approach integrates classical traffic flow theory, gap acceptance models, and microscopic simulation into a physics-informed RL framework. By abstracting roads into super-segments, the agent captures emergent flow dynamics and learns robust speed modulation policies from instantaneous traffic observations. Evaluated in the high-fidelity PTV Vissim simulator on a real-world highway network, our method improves total throughput by 5%, reduces average delay by 13%, and decreases total stops by 3% compared to the no-control setting. It also achieves smoother, congestion-resistant flow while generalizing across varied traffic patterns, demonstrating its potential for scalable, ML-driven traffic management.
GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction
Long-term traffic prediction is highly challenging due to the complexity of traffic systems and the constantly changing nature of many impacting factors. In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal factors, and propose a graph multi-attention network (GMAN) to predict traffic conditions for time steps ahead at different locations on a road network graph. GMAN adapts an encoder-decoder architecture, where both the encoder and the decoder consist of multiple spatio-temporal attention blocks to model the impact of the spatio-temporal factors on traffic conditions. The encoder encodes the input traffic features and the decoder predicts the output sequence. Between the encoder and the decoder, a transform attention layer is applied to convert the encoded traffic features to generate the sequence representations of future time steps as the input of the decoder. The transform attention mechanism models the direct relationships between historical and future time steps that helps to alleviate the error propagation problem among prediction time steps. Experimental results on two real-world traffic prediction tasks (i.e., traffic volume prediction and traffic speed prediction) demonstrate the superiority of GMAN. In particular, in the 1 hour ahead prediction, GMAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 4% improvement in MAE measure. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhengchuanpan/GMAN.
Unified Scaling Laws for Routed Language Models
The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.
Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting
Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.
Minimalist Traffic Prediction: Linear Layer Is All You Need
Traffic prediction is essential for the progression of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the vision of smart cities. While Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have shown promise in this domain by leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) integrated with either RNNs or Transformers, they present challenges such as computational complexity, gradient issues, and resource-intensiveness. This paper addresses these challenges, advocating for three main solutions: a node-embedding approach, time series decomposition, and periodicity learning. We introduce STLinear, a minimalist model architecture designed for optimized efficiency and performance. Unlike traditional STGNNs, STlinear operates fully locally, avoiding inter-node data exchanges, and relies exclusively on linear layers, drastically cutting computational demands. Our empirical studies on real-world datasets confirm STLinear's prowess, matching or exceeding the accuracy of leading STGNNs, but with significantly reduced complexity and computation overhead (more than 95% reduction in MACs per epoch compared to state-of-the-art STGNN baseline published in 2023). In summary, STLinear emerges as a potent, efficient alternative to conventional STGNNs, with profound implications for the future of ITS and smart city initiatives.
Generative Modeling of Graphs via Joint Diffusion of Node and Edge Attributes
Graph generation is integral to various engineering and scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, existing methodologies tend to overlook the generation of edge attributes. However, we identify critical applications where edge attributes are essential, making prior methods potentially unsuitable in such contexts. Moreover, while trivial adaptations are available, empirical investigations reveal their limited efficacy as they do not properly model the interplay among graph components. To address this, we propose a joint score-based model of nodes and edges for graph generation that considers all graph components. Our approach offers two key novelties: (i) node and edge attributes are combined in an attention module that generates samples based on the two ingredients; and (ii) node, edge and adjacency information are mutually dependent during the graph diffusion process. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks involving real-world and synthetic datasets in which edge features are crucial. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset that incorporates edge values. Furthermore, we propose a novel application that greatly benefits from the method due to its nature: the generation of traffic scenes represented as graphs. Our method outperforms other graph generation methods, demonstrating a significant advantage in edge-related measures.
Scalable Multi-modal Model Predictive Control via Duality-based Interaction Predictions
We propose a hierarchical architecture designed for scalable real-time Model Predictive Control (MPC) in complex, multi-modal traffic scenarios. This architecture comprises two key components: 1) RAID-Net, a novel attention-based Recurrent Neural Network that predicts relevant interactions along the MPC prediction horizon between the autonomous vehicle and the surrounding vehicles using Lagrangian duality, and 2) a reduced Stochastic MPC problem that eliminates irrelevant collision avoidance constraints, enhancing computational efficiency. Our approach is demonstrated in a simulated traffic intersection with interactive surrounding vehicles, showcasing a 12x speed-up in solving the motion planning problem. A video demonstrating the proposed architecture in multiple complex traffic scenarios can be found here: https://youtu.be/-pRiOnPb9_c. GitHub: https://github.com/MPC-Berkeley/hmpc_raidnet
Topological street-network characterization through feature-vector and cluster analysis
Complex networks provide a means to describe cities through their street mesh, expressing characteristics that refer to the structure and organization of an urban zone. Although other studies have used complex networks to model street meshes, we observed a lack of methods to characterize the relationship between cities by using their topological features. Accordingly, this paper aims to describe interactions between cities by using vectors of topological features extracted from their street meshes represented as complex networks. The methodology of this study is based on the use of digital maps. Over the computational representation of such maps, we extract global complex-network features that embody the characteristics of the cities. These vectors allow for the use of multidimensional projection and clustering techniques, enabling a similarity-based comparison of the street meshes. We experiment with 645 cities from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. Our results show how the joint of global features describes urban indicators that are deep-rooted in the network's topology and how they reveal characteristics and similarities among sets of cities that are separated from each other.
Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.
Reconstructing commuters network using machine learning and urban indicators
Human mobility has a significant impact on several layers of society, from infrastructural planning and economics to the spread of diseases and crime. Representing the system as a complex network, in which nodes are assigned to regions (e.g., a city) and links indicate the flow of people between two of them, physics-inspired models have been proposed to quantify the number of people migrating from one city to the other. Despite the advances made by these models, our ability to predict the number of commuters and reconstruct mobility networks remains limited. Here, we propose an alternative approach using machine learning and 22 urban indicators to predict the flow of people and reconstruct the intercity commuters network. Our results reveal that predictions based on machine learning algorithms and urban indicators can reconstruct the commuters network with 90.4% of accuracy and describe 77.6% of the variance observed in the flow of people between cities. We also identify essential features to recover the network structure and the urban indicators mostly related to commuting patterns. As previously reported, distance plays a significant role in commuting, but other indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and unemployment rate, are also driven-forces for people to commute. We believe that our results shed new lights on the modeling of migration and reinforce the role of urban indicators on commuting patterns. Also, because link-prediction and network reconstruction are still open challenges in network science, our results have implications in other areas, like economics, social sciences, and biology, where node attributes can give us information about the existence of links connecting entities in the network.
Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting
There is a recent surge in the development of spatio-temporal forecasting models in the transportation domain. Long-range traffic forecasting, however, remains a challenging task due to the intricate and extensive spatio-temporal correlations observed in traffic networks. Current works primarily rely on road networks with graph structures and learn representations using graph neural networks (GNNs), but this approach suffers from over-smoothing problem in deep architectures. To tackle this problem, recent methods introduced the combination of GNNs with residual connections or neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). However, current graph ODE models face two key limitations in feature extraction: (1) they lean towards global temporal patterns, overlooking local patterns that are important for unexpected events; and (2) they lack dynamic semantic edges in their architectural design. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks (GRAM-ODE) which is designed with multiple connective ODE-GNN modules to learn better representations by capturing different views of complex local and global dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies. We also add some techniques like shared weights and divergence constraints into the intermediate layers of distinct ODE-GNN modules to further improve their communication towards the forecasting task. Our extensive set of experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GRAM-ODE compared with state-of-the-art baselines as well as the contribution of different components to the overall performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zbliu98/GRAM-ODE
TrafficLens: Multi-Camera Traffic Video Analysis Using LLMs
Traffic cameras are essential in urban areas, playing a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. Multiple cameras at intersections enhance law enforcement capabilities, traffic management, and pedestrian safety. However, efficiently managing and analyzing multi-camera feeds poses challenges due to the vast amount of data. Analyzing such huge video data requires advanced analytical tools. While Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, equipped with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, excel in text-based tasks, integrating them into traffic video analysis demands converting video data into text using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), which is time-consuming and delays the timely utilization of traffic videos for generating insights and investigating incidents. To address these challenges, we propose TrafficLens, a tailored algorithm for multi-camera traffic intersections. TrafficLens employs a sequential approach, utilizing overlapping coverage areas of cameras. It iteratively applies VLMs with varying token limits, using previous outputs as prompts for subsequent cameras, enabling rapid generation of detailed textual descriptions while reducing processing time. Additionally, TrafficLens intelligently bypasses redundant VLM invocations through an object-level similarity detector. Experimental results with real-world datasets demonstrate that TrafficLens reduces video-to-text conversion time by up to 4times while maintaining information accuracy.
URB -- Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles
Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) promise to reduce congestion in future urban networks, potentially by optimizing their routing decisions. Unlike for human drivers, these decisions can be made with collective, data-driven policies, developed by machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning (RL) can facilitate the development of such collective routing strategies, yet standardized and realistic benchmarks are missing. To that end, we present : Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles. is a comprehensive benchmarking environment that unifies evaluation across 29 real-world traffic networks paired with realistic demand patterns. comes with a catalog of predefined tasks, four state-of-the-art multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm implementations, three baseline methods, domain-specific performance metrics, and a modular configuration scheme. Our results suggest that, despite the lengthy and costly training, state-of-the-art MARL algorithms rarely outperformed humans. Experimental results reported in this paper initiate the first leaderboard for MARL in large-scale urban routing optimization and reveal that current approaches struggle to scale, emphasizing the urgent need for advancements in this domain.
AutoFed: Manual-Free Federated Traffic Prediction via Personalized Prompt
Accurate traffic prediction is essential for Intelligent Transportation Systems, including ride-hailing, urban road planning, and vehicle fleet management. However, due to significant privacy concerns surrounding traffic data, most existing methods rely on local training, resulting in data silos and limited knowledge sharing. Federated Learning (FL) offers an efficient solution through privacy-preserving collaborative training; however, standard FL struggles with the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) problem among clients. This challenge has led to the emergence of Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) as a promising paradigm. Nevertheless, current PFL frameworks require further adaptation for traffic prediction tasks, such as specialized graph feature engineering, data processing, and network architecture design. A notable limitation of many prior studies is their reliance on hyper-parameter optimization across datasets-information that is often unavailable in real-world scenarios-thus impeding practical deployment. To address this challenge, we propose AutoFed, a novel PFL framework for traffic prediction that eliminates the need for manual hyper-parameter tuning. Inspired by prompt learning, AutoFed introduces a federated representor that employs a client-aligned adapter to distill local data into a compact, globally shared prompt matrix. This prompt then conditions a personalized predictor, allowing each client to benefit from cross-client knowledge while maintaining local specificity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that AutoFed consistently achieves superior performance across diverse scenarios. The code of this paper is provided at https://github.com/RS2002/AutoFed .
Critical Nodes Identification in Complex Networks: A Survey
Complex networks have become essential tools for understanding diverse phenomena in social systems, traffic systems, biomolecular systems, and financial systems. Identifying critical nodes is a central theme in contemporary research, serving as a vital bridge between theoretical foundations and practical applications. Nevertheless, the intrinsic complexity and structural heterogeneity characterizing real-world networks, with particular emphasis on dynamic and higher-order networks, present substantial obstacles to the development of universal frameworks for critical node identification. This paper provides a comprehensive review of critical node identification techniques, categorizing them into seven main classes: centrality, critical nodes deletion problem, influence maximization, network control, artificial intelligence, higher-order and dynamic methods. Our review bridges the gaps in existing surveys by systematically classifying methods based on their methodological foundations and practical implications, and by highlighting their strengths, limitations, and applicability across different network types. Our work enhances the understanding of critical node research by identifying key challenges, such as algorithmic universality, real-time evaluation in dynamic networks, analysis of higher-order structures, and computational efficiency in large-scale networks. The structured synthesis consolidates current progress and highlights open questions, particularly in modeling temporal dynamics, advancing efficient algorithms, integrating machine learning approaches, and developing scalable and interpretable metrics for complex systems.
STDA-Meta: A Meta-Learning Framework for Few-Shot Traffic Prediction
As the development of cities, traffic congestion becomes an increasingly pressing issue, and traffic prediction is a classic method to relieve that issue. Traffic prediction is one specific application of spatio-temporal prediction learning, like taxi scheduling, weather prediction, and ship trajectory prediction. Against these problems, classical spatio-temporal prediction learning methods including deep learning, require large amounts of training data. In reality, some newly developed cities with insufficient sensors would not hold that assumption, and the data scarcity makes predictive performance worse. In such situation, the learning method on insufficient data is known as few-shot learning (FSL), and the FSL of traffic prediction remains challenges. On the one hand, graph structures' irregularity and dynamic nature of graphs cannot hold the performance of spatio-temporal learning method. On the other hand, conventional domain adaptation methods cannot work well on insufficient training data, when transferring knowledge from different domains to the intended target domain.To address these challenges, we propose a novel spatio-temporal domain adaptation (STDA) method that learns transferable spatio-temporal meta-knowledge from data-sufficient cities in an adversarial manner. This learned meta-knowledge can improve the prediction performance of data-scarce cities. Specifically, we train the STDA model using a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) based episode learning process, which is a model-agnostic meta-learning framework that enables the model to solve new learning tasks using only a small number of training samples. We conduct numerous experiments on four traffic prediction datasets, and our results show that the prediction performance of our model has improved by 7\% compared to baseline models on the two metrics of MAE and RMSE.
TESTAM: A Time-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Attention Model with Mixture of Experts
Accurate traffic forecasting is challenging due to the complex dependency on road networks, various types of roads, and the abrupt speed change due to the events. Recent works mainly focus on dynamic spatial modeling with adaptive graph embedding or graph attention having less consideration for temporal characteristics and in-situ modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model named TESTAM, which individually models recurring and non-recurring traffic patterns by a mixture-of-experts model with three experts on temporal modeling, spatio-temporal modeling with static graph, and dynamic spatio-temporal dependency modeling with dynamic graph. By introducing different experts and properly routing them, TESTAM could better model various circumstances, including spatially isolated nodes, highly related nodes, and recurring and non-recurring events. For the proper routing, we reformulate a gating problem into a classification problem with pseudo labels. Experimental results on three public traffic network datasets, METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, and EXPY-TKY, demonstrate that TESTAM achieves a better indication and modeling of recurring and non-recurring traffic. We published the official code at https://github.com/HyunWookL/TESTAM
Towards Satellite Image Road Graph Extraction: A Global-Scale Dataset and A Novel Method
Recently, road graph extraction has garnered increasing attention due to its crucial role in autonomous driving, navigation, etc. However, accurately and efficiently extracting road graphs remains a persistent challenge, primarily due to the severe scarcity of labeled data. To address this limitation, we collect a global-scale satellite road graph extraction dataset, i.e. Global-Scale dataset. Specifically, the Global-Scale dataset is sim20 times larger than the largest existing public road extraction dataset and spans over 13,800 km^2 globally. Additionally, we develop a novel road graph extraction model, i.e. SAM-Road++, which adopts a node-guided resampling method to alleviate the mismatch issue between training and inference in SAM-Road, a pioneering state-of-the-art road graph extraction model. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective ``extended-line'' strategy in SAM-Road++ to mitigate the occlusion issue on the road. Extensive experiments demonstrate the validity of the collected Global-Scale dataset and the proposed SAM-Road++ method, particularly highlighting its superior predictive power in unseen regions. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/earth-insights/samroadplus.
Single-agent Reinforcement Learning Model for Regional Adaptive Traffic Signal Control
Several studies have employed reinforcement learning (RL) to address the challenges of regional adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) and achieved promising results. In this field, existing research predominantly adopts multi-agent frameworks. However, the adoption of multi-agent frameworks presents challenges for scalability. Instead, the Traffic signal control (TSC) problem necessitates a single-agent framework. TSC inherently relies on centralized management by a single control center, which can monitor traffic conditions across all roads in the study area and coordinate the control of all intersections. This work proposes a single-agent RL-based regional ATSC model compatible with probe vehicle technology. Key components of the RL design include state, action, and reward function definitions. To facilitate learning and manage congestion, both state and reward functions are defined based on queue length, with action designed to regulate queue dynamics. The queue length definition used in this study differs slightly from conventional definitions but is closely correlated with congestion states. More importantly, it allows for reliable estimation using link travel time data from probe vehicles. With probe vehicle data already covering most urban roads, this feature enhances the proposed method's potential for widespread deployment. The method was comprehensively evaluated using the SUMO simulation platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively mitigates large-scale regional congestion levels via coordinated multi-intersection control.
Progressive Text-to-3D Generation for Automatic 3D Prototyping
Text-to-3D generation is to craft a 3D object according to a natural language description. This can significantly reduce the workload for manually designing 3D models and provide a more natural way of interaction for users. However, this problem remains challenging in recovering the fine-grained details effectively and optimizing a large-size 3D output efficiently. Inspired by the success of progressive learning, we propose a Multi-Scale Triplane Network (MTN) and a new progressive learning strategy. As the name implies, the Multi-Scale Triplane Network consists of four triplanes transitioning from low to high resolution. The low-resolution triplane could serve as an initial shape for the high-resolution ones, easing the optimization difficulty. To further enable the fine-grained details, we also introduce the progressive learning strategy, which explicitly demands the network to shift its focus of attention from simple coarse-grained patterns to difficult fine-grained patterns. Our experiment verifies that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods. For even the most challenging descriptions, where most existing methods struggle to produce a viable shape, our proposed method consistently delivers. We aspire for our work to pave the way for automatic 3D prototyping via natural language descriptions.
A distance-based tool-set to track inconsistent urban structures through complex-networks
Complex networks can be used for modeling street meshes and urban agglomerates. With such a model, many aspects of a city can be investigated to promote a better quality of life to its citizens. Along these lines, this paper proposes a set of distance-based pattern-discovery algorithmic instruments to improve urban structures modeled as complex networks, detecting nodes that lack access from/to points of interest in a given city. Furthermore, we introduce a greedy algorithm that is able to recommend improvements to the structure of a city by suggesting where points of interest are to be placed. We contribute to a thorough process to deal with complex networks, including mathematical modeling and algorithmic innovation. The set of our contributions introduces a systematic manner to treat a recurrent problem of broad interest in cities.
A Countrywide Traffic Accident Dataset
Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge. However, the majority of studies on traffic accident analysis and prediction have used small-scale datasets with limited coverage, which limits their impact and applicability; and existing large-scale datasets are either private, old, or do not include important contextual information such as environmental stimuli (weather, points-of-interest, etc.). In order to help the research community address these shortcomings we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. US-Accidents currently contains data about 2.25 million instances of traffic accidents that took place within the contiguous United States, and over the last three years. Each accident record consists of a variety of intrinsic and contextual attributes such as location, time, natural language description, weather, period-of-day, and points-of-interest. We present this dataset in this paper, along with a wide range of insights gleaned from this dataset with respect to the spatiotemporal characteristics of accidents. The dataset is publicly available at https://smoosavi.org/datasets/us_accidents.
From Cities to Series: Complex Networks and Deep Learning for Improved Spatial and Temporal Analytics*
Graphs have often been used to answer questions about the interaction between real-world entities by taking advantage of their capacity to represent complex topologies. Complex networks are known to be graphs that capture such non-trivial topologies; they are able to represent human phenomena such as epidemic processes, the dynamics of populations, and the urbanization of cities. The investigation of complex networks has been extrapolated to many fields of science, with particular emphasis on computing techniques, including artificial intelligence. In such a case, the analysis of the interaction between entities of interest is transposed to the internal learning of algorithms, a paradigm whose investigation is able to expand the state of the art in Computer Science. By exploring this paradigm, this thesis puts together complex networks and machine learning techniques to improve the understanding of the human phenomena observed in pandemics, pendular migration, and street networks. Accordingly, we contribute with: (i) a new neural network architecture capable of modeling dynamic processes observed in spatial and temporal data with applications in epidemics propagation, weather forecasting, and patient monitoring in intensive care units; (ii) a machine-learning methodology for analyzing and predicting links in the scope of human mobility between all the cities of Brazil; and, (iii) techniques for identifying inconsistencies in the urban planning of cities while tracking the most influential vertices, with applications over Brazilian and worldwide cities. We obtained results sustained by sound evidence of advances to the state of the art in artificial intelligence, rigorous formalisms, and ample experimentation. Our findings rely upon real-world applications in a range of domains, demonstrating the applicability of our methodologies.
Trajeglish: Learning the Language of Driving Scenarios
A longstanding challenge for self-driving development is simulating dynamic driving scenarios seeded from recorded driving logs. In pursuit of this functionality, we apply tools from discrete sequence modeling to model how vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists interact in driving scenarios. Using a simple data-driven tokenization scheme, we discretize trajectories to centimeter-level resolution using a small vocabulary. We then model the multi-agent sequence of motion tokens with a GPT-like encoder-decoder that is autoregressive in time and takes into account intra-timestep interaction between agents. Scenarios sampled from our model exhibit state-of-the-art realism; our model tops the Waymo Sim Agents Benchmark, surpassing prior work along the realism meta metric by 3.3% and along the interaction metric by 9.9%. We ablate our modeling choices in full autonomy and partial autonomy settings, and show that the representations learned by our model can quickly be adapted to improve performance on nuScenes. We additionally evaluate the scalability of our model with respect to parameter count and dataset size, and use density estimates from our model to quantify the saliency of context length and intra-timestep interaction for the traffic modeling task.
Short-Term Flow-Based Bandwidth Forecasting using Machine Learning
This paper proposes a novel framework to predict traffic flows' bandwidth ahead of time. Modern network management systems share a common issue: the network situation evolves between the moment the decision is made and the moment when actions (countermeasures) are applied. This framework converts packets from real-life traffic into flows containing relevant features. Machine learning models, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, XGBoost, and Deep Neural Network, are trained on these data to predict the bandwidth at the next time instance for every flow. Predictions can be fed to the management system instead of current flows bandwidth in order to take decisions on a more accurate network state. Experiments were performed on 981,774 flows and 15 different time windows (from 0.03s to 4s). They show that the Random Forest is the best performing and most reliable model, with a predictive performance consistently better than relying on the current bandwidth (+19.73% in mean absolute error and +18.00% in root mean square error). Experimental results indicate that this framework can help network management systems to take more informed decisions using a predicted network state.
DRIFT open dataset: A drone-derived intelligence for traffic analysis in urban environmen
Reliable traffic data are essential for understanding urban mobility and developing effective traffic management strategies. This study introduces the DRone-derived Intelligence For Traffic analysis (DRIFT) dataset, a large-scale urban traffic dataset collected systematically from synchronized drone videos at approximately 250 meters altitude, covering nine interconnected intersections in Daejeon, South Korea. DRIFT provides high-resolution vehicle trajectories that include directional information, processed through video synchronization and orthomap alignment, resulting in a comprehensive dataset of 81,699 vehicle trajectories. Through our DRIFT dataset, researchers can simultaneously analyze traffic at multiple scales - from individual vehicle maneuvers like lane-changes and safety metrics such as time-to-collision to aggregate network flow dynamics across interconnected urban intersections. The DRIFT dataset is structured to enable immediate use without additional preprocessing, complemented by open-source models for object detection and trajectory extraction, as well as associated analytical tools. DRIFT is expected to significantly contribute to academic research and practical applications, such as traffic flow analysis and simulation studies. The dataset and related resources are publicly accessible at https://github.com/AIxMobility/The-DRIFT.
TrafficMOT: A Challenging Dataset for Multi-Object Tracking in Complex Traffic Scenarios
Multi-object tracking in traffic videos is a crucial research area, offering immense potential for enhancing traffic monitoring accuracy and promoting road safety measures through the utilisation of advanced machine learning algorithms. However, existing datasets for multi-object tracking in traffic videos often feature limited instances or focus on single classes, which cannot well simulate the challenges encountered in complex traffic scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce TrafficMOT, an extensive dataset designed to encompass diverse traffic situations with complex scenarios. To validate the complexity and challenges presented by TrafficMOT, we conducted comprehensive empirical studies using three different settings: fully-supervised, semi-supervised, and a recent powerful zero-shot foundation model Tracking Anything Model (TAM). The experimental results highlight the inherent complexity of this dataset, emphasising its value in driving advancements in the field of traffic monitoring and multi-object tracking.
SMART: A Surrogate Model for Predicting Application Runtime in Dragonfly Systems
The Dragonfly network, with its high-radix and low-diameter structure, is a leading interconnect in high-performance computing. A major challenge is workload interference on shared network links. Parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) is commonly used to analyze workload interference. However, high-fidelity PDES is computationally expensive, making it impractical for large-scale or real-time scenarios. Hybrid simulation that incorporates data-driven surrogate models offers a promising alternative, especially for forecasting application runtime, a task complicated by the dynamic behavior of network traffic. We present \ourmodel, a surrogate model that combines graph neural networks (GNNs) and large language models (LLMs) to capture both spatial and temporal patterns from port level router data. \ourmodel outperforms existing statistical and machine learning baselines, enabling accurate runtime prediction and supporting efficient hybrid simulation of Dragonfly networks.
Traffic-R1: Reinforced LLMs Bring Human-Like Reasoning to Traffic Signal Control Systems
Traffic signal control (TSC) is vital for mitigating congestion and sustaining urban mobility. In this paper, we introduce Traffic-R1, a foundation model with human-like reasoning for TSC systems. Our model is developed through self-exploration and iteration of reinforced large language models (LLMs) with expert guidance in a simulated traffic environment. Compared to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) and recent LLM-based methods, Traffic-R1 offers three significant advantages. First, Traffic-R1 delivers zero-shot generalisation, transferring unchanged to new road networks and out-of-distribution incidents by utilizing its internal traffic control policies and human-like reasoning. Second, its 3B-parameter architecture is lightweight enough for real-time inference on mobile-class chips, enabling large-scale edge deployment. Third, Traffic-R1 provides an explainable TSC process and facilitates multi-intersection communication through its self-iteration and a new synchronous communication network. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that Traffic-R1 sets a new state of the art, outperforming strong baselines and training-intensive RL controllers. In practice, the model now manages signals for more than 55,000 drivers daily, shortening average queues by over 5% and halving operator workload. Our checkpoint is available at https://huggingface.co/Season998/Traffic-R1.
Forecasting Trajectory and Behavior of Road-Agents Using Spectral Clustering in Graph-LSTMs
We present a novel approach for traffic forecasting in urban traffic scenarios using a combination of spectral graph analysis and deep learning. We predict both the low-level information (future trajectories) as well as the high-level information (road-agent behavior) from the extracted trajectory of each road-agent. Our formulation represents the proximity between the road agents using a weighted dynamic geometric graph (DGG). We use a two-stream graph-LSTM network to perform traffic forecasting using these weighted DGGs. The first stream predicts the spatial coordinates of road-agents, while the second stream predicts whether a road-agent is going to exhibit overspeeding, underspeeding, or neutral behavior by modeling spatial interactions between road-agents. Additionally, we propose a new regularization algorithm based on spectral clustering to reduce the error margin in long-term prediction (3-5 seconds) and improve the accuracy of the predicted trajectories. Moreover, we prove a theoretical upper bound on the regularized prediction error. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse, Lyft, Apolloscape, and NGSIM datasets and highlight the benefits over prior trajectory prediction methods. In practice, our approach reduces the average prediction error by approximately 75% over prior algorithms and achieves a weighted average accuracy of 91.2% for behavior prediction. Additionally, our spectral regularization improves long-term prediction by up to 70%.
ST-LINK: Spatially-Aware Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting
Traffic forecasting represents a crucial problem within intelligent transportation systems. In recent research, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising method, but their intrinsic design, tailored primarily for sequential token processing, introduces notable challenges in effectively capturing spatial dependencies. Specifically, the inherent limitations of LLMs in modeling spatial relationships and their architectural incompatibility with graph-structured spatial data remain largely unaddressed. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ST-LINK, a novel framework that enhances the capability of Large Language Models to capture spatio-temporal dependencies. Its key components are Spatially-Enhanced Attention (SE-Attention) and the Memory Retrieval Feed-Forward Network (MRFFN). SE-Attention extends rotary position embeddings to integrate spatial correlations as direct rotational transformations within the attention mechanism. This approach maximizes spatial learning while preserving the LLM's inherent sequential processing structure. Meanwhile, MRFFN dynamically retrieves and utilizes key historical patterns to capture complex temporal dependencies and improve the stability of long-term forecasting. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that ST-LINK surpasses conventional deep learning and LLM approaches, and effectively captures both regular traffic patterns and abrupt changes.
MLPST: MLP is All You Need for Spatio-Temporal Prediction
Traffic prediction is a typical spatio-temporal data mining task and has great significance to the public transportation system. Considering the demand for its grand application, we recognize key factors for an ideal spatio-temporal prediction method: efficient, lightweight, and effective. However, the current deep model-based spatio-temporal prediction solutions generally own intricate architectures with cumbersome optimization, which can hardly meet these expectations. To accomplish the above goals, we propose an intuitive and novel framework, MLPST, a pure multi-layer perceptron architecture for traffic prediction. Specifically, we first capture spatial relationships from both local and global receptive fields. Then, temporal dependencies in different intervals are comprehensively considered. Through compact and swift MLP processing, MLPST can well capture the spatial and temporal dependencies while requiring only linear computational complexity, as well as model parameters that are more than an order of magnitude lower than baselines. Extensive experiments validated the superior effectiveness and efficiency of MLPST against advanced baselines, and among models with optimal accuracy, MLPST achieves the best time and space efficiency.
IntersectionZoo: Eco-driving for Benchmarking Multi-Agent Contextual Reinforcement Learning
Despite the popularity of multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated and two-player applications, its success in messy real-world applications has been limited. A key challenge lies in its generalizability across problem variations, a common necessity for many real-world problems. Contextual reinforcement learning (CRL) formalizes learning policies that generalize across problem variations. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for multi-agent CRL has hindered progress in the field. Such benchmarks are desired to be based on real-world applications to naturally capture the many open challenges of real-world problems that affect generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose IntersectionZoo, a comprehensive benchmark suite for multi-agent CRL through the real-world application of cooperative eco-driving in urban road networks. The task of cooperative eco-driving is to control a fleet of vehicles to reduce fleet-level vehicular emissions. By grounding IntersectionZoo in a real-world application, we naturally capture real-world problem characteristics, such as partial observability and multiple competing objectives. IntersectionZoo is built on data-informed simulations of 16,334 signalized intersections derived from 10 major US cities, modeled in an open-source industry-grade microscopic traffic simulator. By modeling factors affecting vehicular exhaust emissions (e.g., temperature, road conditions, travel demand), IntersectionZoo provides one million data-driven traffic scenarios. Using these traffic scenarios, we benchmark popular multi-agent RL and human-like driving algorithms and demonstrate that the popular multi-agent RL algorithms struggle to generalize in CRL settings.
DLCSS: Dynamic Longest Common Subsequences
Autonomous driving is a key technology towards a brighter, more sustainable future. To enable such a future, it is necessary to utilize autonomous vehicles in shared mobility models. However, to evaluate, whether two or more route requests have the potential for a shared ride, is a compute-intensive task, if done by rerouting. In this work, we propose the Dynamic Longest Common Subsequences algorithm for fast and cost-efficient comparison of two routes for their compatibility, dynamically only incorporating parts of the routes which are suited for a shared trip. Based on this, one can also estimate, how many autonomous vehicles might be necessary to fulfill the local mobility demands. This can help providers to estimate the necessary fleet sizes, policymakers to better understand mobility patterns and cities to scale necessary infrastructure.
METEOR:A Dense, Heterogeneous, and Unstructured Traffic Dataset With Rare Behaviors
We present a new traffic dataset, METEOR, which captures traffic patterns and multi-agent driving behaviors in unstructured scenarios. METEOR consists of more than 1000 one-minute videos, over 2 million annotated frames with bounding boxes and GPS trajectories for 16 unique agent categories, and more than 13 million bounding boxes for traffic agents. METEOR is a dataset for rare and interesting, multi-agent driving behaviors that are grouped into traffic violations, atypical interactions, and diverse scenarios. Every video in METEOR is tagged using a diverse range of factors corresponding to weather, time of the day, road conditions, and traffic density. We use METEOR to benchmark perception methods for object detection and multi-agent behavior prediction. Our key finding is that state-of-the-art models for object detection and behavior prediction, which otherwise succeed on existing datasets such as Waymo, fail on the METEOR dataset. METEOR marks the first step towards the development of more sophisticated perception models for dense, heterogeneous, and unstructured scenarios.
Text2Traffic: A Text-to-Image Generation and Editing Method for Traffic Scenes
With the rapid advancement of intelligent transportation systems, text-driven image generation and editing techniques have demonstrated significant potential in providing rich, controllable visual scene data for applications such as traffic monitoring and autonomous driving. However, several challenges remain, including insufficient semantic richness of generated traffic elements, limited camera viewpoints, low visual fidelity of synthesized images, and poor alignment between textual descriptions and generated content. To address these issues, we propose a unified text-driven framework for both image generation and editing, leveraging a controllable mask mechanism to seamlessly integrate the two tasks. Furthermore, we incorporate both vehicle-side and roadside multi-view data to enhance the geometric diversity of traffic scenes. Our training strategy follows a two-stage paradigm: first, we perform conceptual learning using large-scale coarse-grained text-image data; then, we fine-tune with fine-grained descriptive data to enhance text-image alignment and detail quality. Additionally, we introduce a mask-region-weighted loss that dynamically emphasizes small yet critical regions during training, thereby substantially enhancing the generation fidelity of small-scale traffic elements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves leading performance in text-based image generation and editing within traffic scenes.
HGNET: A Hierarchical Feature Guided Network for Occupancy Flow Field Prediction
Predicting the motion of multiple traffic participants has always been one of the most challenging tasks in autonomous driving. The recently proposed occupancy flow field prediction method has shown to be a more effective and scalable representation compared to general trajectory prediction methods. However, in complex multi-agent traffic scenarios, it remains difficult to model the interactions among various factors and the dependencies among prediction outputs at different time steps. In view of this, we propose a transformer-based hierarchical feature guided network (HGNET), which can efficiently extract features of agents and map information from visual and vectorized inputs, modeling multimodal interaction relationships. Second, we design the Feature-Guided Attention (FGAT) module to leverage the potential guiding effects between different prediction targets, thereby improving prediction accuracy. Additionally, to enhance the temporal consistency and causal relationships of the predictions, we propose a Time Series Memory framework to learn the conditional distribution models of the prediction outputs at future time steps from multivariate time series. The results demonstrate that our model exhibits competitive performance, which ranks 3rd in the 2024 Waymo Occupancy and Flow Prediction Challenge.
Graph Representation Learning for Road Type Classification
We present a novel learning-based approach to graph representations of road networks employing state-of-the-art graph convolutional neural networks. Our approach is applied to realistic road networks of 17 cities from Open Street Map. While edge features are crucial to generate descriptive graph representations of road networks, graph convolutional networks usually rely on node features only. We show that the highly representative edge features can still be integrated into such networks by applying a line graph transformation. We also propose a method for neighborhood sampling based on a topological neighborhood composed of both local and global neighbors. We compare the performance of learning representations using different types of neighborhood aggregation functions in transductive and inductive tasks and in supervised and unsupervised learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel aggregation approach, Graph Attention Isomorphism Network, GAIN. Our results show that GAIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the road type classification problem.
IDD-3D: Indian Driving Dataset for 3D Unstructured Road Scenes
Autonomous driving and assistance systems rely on annotated data from traffic and road scenarios to model and learn the various object relations in complex real-world scenarios. Preparation and training of deploy-able deep learning architectures require the models to be suited to different traffic scenarios and adapt to different situations. Currently, existing datasets, while large-scale, lack such diversities and are geographically biased towards mainly developed cities. An unstructured and complex driving layout found in several developing countries such as India poses a challenge to these models due to the sheer degree of variations in the object types, densities, and locations. To facilitate better research toward accommodating such scenarios, we build a new dataset, IDD-3D, which consists of multi-modal data from multiple cameras and LiDAR sensors with 12k annotated driving LiDAR frames across various traffic scenarios. We discuss the need for this dataset through statistical comparisons with existing datasets and highlight benchmarks on standard 3D object detection and tracking tasks in complex layouts. Code and data available at https://github.com/shubham1810/idd3d_kit.git
D-AWSIM: Distributed Autonomous Driving Simulator for Dynamic Map Generation Framework
Autonomous driving systems have achieved significant advances, and full autonomy within defined operational design domains near practical deployment. Expanding these domains requires addressing safety assurance under diverse conditions. Information sharing through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, enabled by a Dynamic Map platform built from vehicle and roadside sensor data, offers a promising solution. Real-world experiments with numerous infrastructure sensors incur high costs and regulatory challenges. Conventional single-host simulators lack the capacity for large-scale urban traffic scenarios. This paper proposes D-AWSIM, a distributed simulator that partitions its workload across multiple machines to support the simulation of extensive sensor deployment and dense traffic environments. A Dynamic Map generation framework on D-AWSIM enables researchers to explore information-sharing strategies without relying on physical testbeds. The evaluation shows that D-AWSIM increases throughput for vehicle count and LiDAR sensor processing substantially compared to a single-machine setup. Integration with Autoware demonstrates applicability for autonomous driving research.
Emergent Road Rules In Multi-Agent Driving Environments
For autonomous vehicles to safely share the road with human drivers, autonomous vehicles must abide by specific "road rules" that human drivers have agreed to follow. "Road rules" include rules that drivers are required to follow by law -- such as the requirement that vehicles stop at red lights -- as well as more subtle social rules -- such as the implicit designation of fast lanes on the highway. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that -- instead of hard-coding road rules into self-driving algorithms -- a scalable alternative may be to design multi-agent environments in which road rules emerge as optimal solutions to the problem of maximizing traffic flow. We analyze what ingredients in driving environments cause the emergence of these road rules and find that two crucial factors are noisy perception and agents' spatial density. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the emergence of seven social driving behaviors, ranging from obeying traffic signals to following lanes, all of which emerge from training agents to drive quickly to destinations without colliding. Our results add empirical support for the social road rules that countries worldwide have agreed on for safe, efficient driving.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for the Joint Control of Traffic Light Signaling and Vehicle Speed Advice
Traffic congestion in dense urban centers presents an economical and environmental burden. In recent years, the availability of vehicle-to-anything communication allows for the transmission of detailed vehicle states to the infrastructure that can be used for intelligent traffic light control. The other way around, the infrastructure can provide vehicles with advice on driving behavior, such as appropriate velocities, which can improve the efficacy of the traffic system. Several research works applied deep reinforcement learning to either traffic light control or vehicle speed advice. In this work, we propose a first attempt to jointly learn the control of both. We show this to improve the efficacy of traffic systems. In our experiments, the joint control approach reduces average vehicle trip delays, w.r.t. controlling only traffic lights, in eight out of eleven benchmark scenarios. Analyzing the qualitative behavior of the vehicle speed advice policy, we observe that this is achieved by smoothing out the velocity profile of vehicles nearby a traffic light. Learning joint control of traffic signaling and speed advice in the real world could help to reduce congestion and mitigate the economical and environmental repercussions of today's traffic systems.
Deep Learning based Computer Vision Methods for Complex Traffic Environments Perception: A Review
Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive literature review on the applications of computer vision in ITS and AD, and discusses challenges related to data, models, and complex urban environments. The data challenges are associated with the collection and labeling of training data and its relevance to real world conditions, bias inherent in datasets, the high volume of data needed to be processed, and privacy concerns. Deep learning (DL) models are commonly too complex for real-time processing on embedded hardware, lack explainability and generalizability, and are hard to test in real-world settings. Complex urban traffic environments have irregular lighting and occlusions, and surveillance cameras can be mounted at a variety of angles, gather dirt, shake in the wind, while the traffic conditions are highly heterogeneous, with violation of rules and complex interactions in crowded scenarios. Some representative applications that suffer from these problems are traffic flow estimation, congestion detection, autonomous driving perception, vehicle interaction, and edge computing for practical deployment. The possible ways of dealing with the challenges are also explored while prioritizing practical deployment.
VL-RouterBench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Model Routing
Multi-model routing has evolved from an engineering technique into essential infrastructure, yet existing work lacks a systematic, reproducible benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs). We present VL-RouterBench to assess the overall capability of VLM routing systems systematically. The benchmark is grounded in raw inference and scoring logs from VLMs and constructs quality and cost matrices over sample-model pairs. In scale, VL-RouterBench covers 14 datasets across 3 task groups, totaling 30,540 samples, and includes 15 open-source models and 2 API models, yielding 519,180 sample-model pairs and a total input-output token volume of 34,494,977. The evaluation protocol jointly measures average accuracy, average cost, and throughput, and builds a ranking score from the harmonic mean of normalized cost and accuracy to enable comparison across router configurations and cost budgets. On this benchmark, we evaluate 10 routing methods and baselines and observe a significant routability gain, while the best current routers still show a clear gap to the ideal Oracle, indicating considerable room for improvement in router architecture through finer visual cues and modeling of textual structure. We will open-source the complete data construction and evaluation toolchain to promote comparability, reproducibility, and practical deployment in multimodal routing research.
UrbanIng-V2X: A Large-Scale Multi-Vehicle, Multi-Infrastructure Dataset Across Multiple Intersections for Cooperative Perception
Recent cooperative perception datasets have played a crucial role in advancing smart mobility applications by enabling information exchange between intelligent agents, helping to overcome challenges such as occlusions and improving overall scene understanding. While some existing real-world datasets incorporate both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure interactions, they are typically limited to a single intersection or a single vehicle. A comprehensive perception dataset featuring multiple connected vehicles and infrastructure sensors across several intersections remains unavailable, limiting the benchmarking of algorithms in diverse traffic environments. Consequently, overfitting can occur, and models may demonstrate misleadingly high performance due to similar intersection layouts and traffic participant behavior. To address this gap, we introduce UrbanIng-V2X, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset supporting cooperative perception involving vehicles and infrastructure sensors deployed across three urban intersections in Ingolstadt, Germany. UrbanIng-V2X consists of 34 temporally aligned and spatially calibrated sensor sequences, each lasting 20 seconds. All sequences contain recordings from one of three intersections, involving two vehicles and up to three infrastructure-mounted sensor poles operating in coordinated scenarios. In total, UrbanIng-V2X provides data from 12 vehicle-mounted RGB cameras, 2 vehicle LiDARs, 17 infrastructure thermal cameras, and 12 infrastructure LiDARs. All sequences are annotated at a frequency of 10 Hz with 3D bounding boxes spanning 13 object classes, resulting in approximately 712k annotated instances across the dataset. We provide comprehensive evaluations using state-of-the-art cooperative perception methods and publicly release the codebase, dataset, HD map, and a digital twin of the complete data collection environment.
Challenging the Need for Packet Spraying in Large-Scale Distributed Training
Large-scale distributed training in production datacenters constitutes a challenging workload bottlenecked by network communication. In response, both major industry players (e.g., Ultra Ethernet Consortium) and parts of academia have surprisingly, and almost unanimously, agreed that packet spraying is necessary to improve the performance of large-scale distributed training workloads. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing belief and pose the question: How close can a singlepath transport approach an optimal multipath transport? We demonstrate that singlepath transport (from a NIC's perspective) is sufficient and can perform nearly as well as an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying, particularly in the context of distributed training in leaf-spine topologies. Our assertion is based on four key observations about workloads driven by collective communication patterns: (i) flows within a collective start almost simultaneously, (ii) flow sizes are nearly equal, (iii) the completion time of a collective is more crucial than individual flow completion times, and (iv) flows can be split upon arrival. We analytically prove that singlepath transport, using minimal flow splitting (at the application layer), is equivalent to an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying in terms of maximum congestion. Our preliminary evaluations support our claims. This paper suggests an alternative agenda for developing next-generation transport protocols tailored for large-scale distributed training.
OpenLane-V2: A Topology Reasoning Benchmark for Unified 3D HD Mapping
Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model's performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.
Graph-based Topology Reasoning for Driving Scenes
Understanding the road genome is essential to realize autonomous driving. This highly intelligent problem contains two aspects - the connection relationship of lanes, and the assignment relationship between lanes and traffic elements, where a comprehensive topology reasoning method is vacant. On one hand, previous map learning techniques struggle in deriving lane connectivity with segmentation or laneline paradigms; or prior lane topology-oriented approaches focus on centerline detection and neglect the interaction modeling. On the other hand, the traffic element to lane assignment problem is limited in the image domain, leaving how to construct the correspondence from two views an unexplored challenge. To address these issues, we present TopoNet, the first end-to-end framework capable of abstracting traffic knowledge beyond conventional perception tasks. To capture the driving scene topology, we introduce three key designs: (1) an embedding module to incorporate semantic knowledge from 2D elements into a unified feature space; (2) a curated scene graph neural network to model relationships and enable feature interaction inside the network; (3) instead of transmitting messages arbitrarily, a scene knowledge graph is devised to differentiate prior knowledge from various types of the road genome. We evaluate TopoNet on the challenging scene understanding benchmark, OpenLane-V2, where our approach outperforms all previous works by a great margin on all perceptual and topological metrics. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/TopoNet
Asynchronous MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning for 5G Routing under Side Constraints
Networks in the current 5G and beyond systems increasingly carry heterogeneous traffic with diverse quality-of-service constraints, making real-time routing decisions both complex and time-critical. A common approach, such as a heuristic with human intervention or training a single centralized RL policy or synchronizing updates across multiple learners, struggles with scalability and straggler effects. We address this by proposing an asynchronous multi-agent reinforcement learning (AMARL) framework in which independent PPO agents, one per service, plan routes in parallel and commit resource deltas to a shared global resource environment. This coordination by state preserves feasibility across services and enables specialization for service-specific objectives. We evaluate the method on an O-RAN like network simulation using nearly real-time traffic data from the city of Montreal. We compared against a single-agent PPO baseline. AMARL achieves a similar Grade of Service (acceptance rate) (GoS) and end-to-end latency, with reduced training wall-clock time and improved robustness to demand shifts. These results suggest that asynchronous, service-specialized agents provide a scalable and practical approach to distributed routing, with applicability extending beyond the O-RAN domain.
Toward Planet-Wide Traffic Camera Calibration
Despite the widespread deployment of outdoor cameras, their potential for automated analysis remains largely untapped due, in part, to calibration challenges. The absence of precise camera calibration data, including intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, hinders accurate real-world distance measurements from captured videos. To address this, we present a scalable framework that utilizes street-level imagery to reconstruct a metric 3D model, facilitating precise calibration of in-the-wild traffic cameras. Notably, our framework achieves 3D scene reconstruction and accurate localization of over 100 global traffic cameras and is scalable to any camera with sufficient street-level imagery. For evaluation, we introduce a dataset of 20 fully calibrated traffic cameras, demonstrating our method's significant enhancements over existing automatic calibration techniques. Furthermore, we highlight our approach's utility in traffic analysis by extracting insights via 3D vehicle reconstruction and speed measurement, thereby opening up the potential of using outdoor cameras for automated analysis.
An Aggregated Multicolumn Dilated Convolution Network for Perspective-Free Counting
We propose the use of dilated filters to construct an aggregation module in a multicolumn convolutional neural network for perspective-free counting. Counting is a common problem in computer vision (e.g. traffic on the street or pedestrians in a crowd). Modern approaches to the counting problem involve the production of a density map via regression whose integral is equal to the number of objects in the image. However, objects in the image can occur at different scales (e.g. due to perspective effects) which can make it difficult for a learning agent to learn the proper density map. While the use of multiple columns to extract multiscale information from images has been shown before, our approach aggregates the multiscale information gathered by the multicolumn convolutional neural network to improve performance. Our experiments show that our proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art on many benchmark datasets, and also that using our aggregation module in combination with a higher number of columns is beneficial for multiscale counting.
Multi-scale Attributed Node Embedding
We present network embedding algorithms that capture information about a node from the local distribution over node attributes around it, as observed over random walks following an approach similar to Skip-gram. Observations from neighborhoods of different sizes are either pooled (AE) or encoded distinctly in a multi-scale approach (MUSAE). Capturing attribute-neighborhood relationships over multiple scales is useful for a diverse range of applications, including latent feature identification across disconnected networks with similar attributes. We prove theoretically that matrices of node-feature pointwise mutual information are implicitly factorized by the embeddings. Experiments show that our algorithms are robust, computationally efficient and outperform comparable models on social networks and web graphs.
Decentralised Traffic Incident Detection via Network Lasso
Traffic incident detection plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems, which has gained great attention in transport engineering. In the past, traditional machine learning (ML) based detection methods achieved good performance under a centralised computing paradigm, where all data are transmitted to a central server for building ML models therein. Nowadays, deep neural networks based federated learning (FL) has become a mainstream detection approach to enable the model training in a decentralised manner while warranting local data governance. Such neural networks-centred techniques, however, have overshadowed the utility of well-established ML-based detection methods. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of potent conventional ML-based detection models in modern traffic scenarios featured by distributed data. We leverage an elegant but less explored distributed optimisation framework named Network Lasso, with guaranteed global convergence for convex problem formulations, integrate the potent convex ML model with it, and compare it with centralised learning, local learning, and federated learning methods atop a well-known traffic incident detection dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed network lasso-based approach provides a promising alternative to the FL-based approach in data-decentralised traffic scenarios, with a strong convergence guarantee while rekindling the significance of conventional ML-based detection methods.
Gated Fusion Enhanced Multi-Scale Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network for Stock Movement Prediction
Accurately predicting stock market movements remains a formidable challenge due to the inherent volatility and complex interdependencies among stocks. Although multi-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) hold potential for modeling these relationships, they frequently neglect two key points: the subtle intra-attribute patterns within each stock affecting inter-stock correlation, and the biased attention to coarse- and fine-grained features during multi-scale sampling. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MS-HGFN (Multi-Scale Hierarchical Graph Fusion Network). The model features a hierarchical GNN module that forms dynamic graphs by learning patterns from intra-attributes and features from inter-attributes over different time scales, thus comprehensively capturing spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, a top-down gating approach facilitates the integration of multi-scale spatio-temporal features, preserving critical coarse- and fine-grained features without too much interference. Experiments utilizing real-world datasets from U.S. and Chinese stock markets demonstrate that MS-HGFN outperforms both traditional and advanced models, yielding up to a 1.4% improvement in prediction accuracy and enhanced stability in return simulations. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MS-HGFN.
An Edge Assisted Robust Smart Traffic Management and Signalling System for Guiding Emergency Vehicles During Peak Hours
Congestion in traffic is an unavoidable circumstance in many cities in India and other countries. It is an issue of major concern. The steep rise in the number of automobiles on the roads followed by old infrastructure, accidents, pedestrian traffic, and traffic rule violations all add to challenging traffic conditions. Given these poor conditions of traffic, there is a critical need for automatically detecting and signaling systems. There are already various technologies that are used for traffic management and signaling systems like video analysis, infrared sensors, and wireless sensors. The main issue with these methods is they are very costly and high maintenance is required. In this paper, we have proposed a three-phase system that can guide emergency vehicles and manage traffic based on the degree of congestion. In the first phase, the system processes the captured images and calculates the Index value which is used to discover the degree of congestion. The Index value of a particular road depends on its width and the length up to which the camera captures images of that road. We have to take input for the parameters (length and width) while setting up the system. In the second phase, the system checks whether there are any emergency vehicles present or not in any lane. In the third phase, the whole processing and decision-making part is performed at the edge server. The proposed model is robust and it takes into consideration adverse weather conditions such as hazy, foggy, and windy. It works very efficiently in low light conditions also. The edge server is a strategically placed server that provides us with low latency and better connectivity. Using Edge technology in this traffic management system reduces the strain on cloud servers and the system becomes more reliable in real-time because the latency and bandwidth get reduced due to processing at the intermediate edge server.
Designing Network Design Spaces
In this work, we present a new network design paradigm. Our goal is to help advance the understanding of network design and discover design principles that generalize across settings. Instead of focusing on designing individual network instances, we design network design spaces that parametrize populations of networks. The overall process is analogous to classic manual design of networks, but elevated to the design space level. Using our methodology we explore the structure aspect of network design and arrive at a low-dimensional design space consisting of simple, regular networks that we call RegNet. The core insight of the RegNet parametrization is surprisingly simple: widths and depths of good networks can be explained by a quantized linear function. We analyze the RegNet design space and arrive at interesting findings that do not match the current practice of network design. The RegNet design space provides simple and fast networks that work well across a wide range of flop regimes. Under comparable training settings and flops, the RegNet models outperform the popular EfficientNet models while being up to 5x faster on GPUs.
Online Test-Time Adaptation of Spatial-Temporal Traffic Flow Forecasting
Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is crucial in aiding traffic managers in implementing control measures and assisting drivers in selecting optimal travel routes. Traditional deep-learning based methods for traffic flow forecasting typically rely on historical data to train their models, which are then used to make predictions on future data. However, the performance of the trained model usually degrades due to the temporal drift between the historical and future data. To make the model trained on historical data better adapt to future data in a fully online manner, this paper conducts the first study of the online test-time adaptation techniques for spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting problems. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Double Correction by Series Decomposition (ADCSD) method, which first decomposes the output of the trained model into seasonal and trend-cyclical parts and then corrects them by two separate modules during the testing phase using the latest observed data entry by entry. In the proposed ADCSD method, instead of fine-tuning the whole trained model during the testing phase, a lite network is attached after the trained model, and only the lite network is fine-tuned in the testing process each time a data entry is observed. Moreover, to satisfy that different time series variables may have different levels of temporal drift, two adaptive vectors are adopted to provide different weights for different time series variables. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic flow forecasting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADCSD method. The code is available at https://github.com/Pengxin-Guo/ADCSD.
OpenSatMap: A Fine-grained High-resolution Satellite Dataset for Large-scale Map Construction
In this paper, we propose OpenSatMap, a fine-grained, high-resolution satellite dataset for large-scale map construction. Map construction is one of the foundations of the transportation industry, such as navigation and autonomous driving. Extracting road structures from satellite images is an efficient way to construct large-scale maps. However, existing satellite datasets provide only coarse semantic-level labels with a relatively low resolution (up to level 19), impeding the advancement of this field. In contrast, the proposed OpenSatMap (1) has fine-grained instance-level annotations; (2) consists of high-resolution images (level 20); (3) is currently the largest one of its kind; (4) collects data with high diversity. Moreover, OpenSatMap covers and aligns with the popular nuScenes dataset and Argoverse 2 dataset to potentially advance autonomous driving technologies. By publishing and maintaining the dataset, we provide a high-quality benchmark for satellite-based map construction and downstream tasks like autonomous driving.
NetMamba: Efficient Network Traffic Classification via Pre-training Unidirectional Mamba
Network traffic classification is a crucial research area aiming to enhance service quality, streamline network management, and bolster cybersecurity. To address the growing complexity of transmission encryption techniques, various machine learning and deep learning methods have been proposed. However, existing approaches face two main challenges. Firstly, they struggle with model inefficiency due to the quadratic complexity of the widely used Transformer architecture. Secondly, they suffer from inadequate traffic representation because of discarding important byte information while retaining unwanted biases. To address these challenges, we propose NetMamba, an efficient linear-time state space model equipped with a comprehensive traffic representation scheme. We adopt a specially selected and improved unidirectional Mamba architecture for the networking field, instead of the Transformer, to address efficiency issues. In addition, we design a traffic representation scheme to extract valid information from massive traffic data while removing biased information. Evaluation experiments on six public datasets encompassing three main classification tasks showcase NetMamba's superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. It achieves an accuracy rate of nearly 99% (some over 99%) in all tasks. Additionally, NetMamba demonstrates excellent efficiency, improving inference speed by up to 60 times while maintaining comparably low memory usage. Furthermore, NetMamba exhibits superior few-shot learning abilities, achieving better classification performance with fewer labeled data. To the best of our knowledge, NetMamba is the first model to tailor the Mamba architecture for networking.
YOLOPv2: Better, Faster, Stronger for Panoptic Driving Perception
Over the last decade, multi-tasking learning approaches have achieved promising results in solving panoptic driving perception problems, providing both high-precision and high-efficiency performance. It has become a popular paradigm when designing networks for real-time practical autonomous driving system, where computation resources are limited. This paper proposed an effective and efficient multi-task learning network to simultaneously perform the task of traffic object detection, drivable road area segmentation and lane detection. Our model achieved the new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of accuracy and speed on the challenging BDD100K dataset. Especially, the inference time is reduced by half compared to the previous SOTA model. Code will be released in the near future.
Neighborhood-aware Scalable Temporal Network Representation Learning
Temporal networks have been widely used to model real-world complex systems such as financial systems and e-commerce systems. In a temporal network, the joint neighborhood of a set of nodes often provides crucial structural information useful for predicting whether they may interact at a certain time. However, recent representation learning methods for temporal networks often fail to extract such information or depend on online construction of structural features, which is time-consuming. To address the issue, this work proposes Neighborhood-Aware Temporal network model (NAT). For each node in the network, NAT abandons the commonly-used one-single-vector-based representation while adopting a novel dictionary-type neighborhood representation. Such a dictionary representation records a downsampled set of the neighboring nodes as keys, and allows fast construction of structural features for a joint neighborhood of multiple nodes. We also design a dedicated data structure termed N-cache to support parallel access and update of those dictionary representations on GPUs. NAT gets evaluated over seven real-world large-scale temporal networks. NAT not only outperforms all cutting-edge baselines by averaged 1.2% and 4.2% in transductive and inductive link prediction accuracy, respectively, but also keeps scalable by achieving a speed-up of 4.1-76.7x against the baselines that adopt joint structural features and achieves a speed-up of 1.6-4.0x against the baselines that cannot adopt those features. The link to the code: https: //github.com/Graph-COM/Neighborhood-Aware-Temporal-Network.
Interaction Dataset of Autonomous Vehicles with Traffic Lights and Signs
This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.
Characterized Diffusion Networks for Enhanced Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction
In this paper, we present a novel trajectory prediction model for autonomous driving, combining a Characterized Diffusion Module and a Spatial-Temporal Interaction Network to address the challenges posed by dynamic and heterogeneous traffic environments. Our model enhances the accuracy and reliability of trajectory predictions by incorporating uncertainty estimation and complex agent interactions. Through extensive experimentation on public datasets such as NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD, our model significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate its ability to capture the underlying spatial-temporal dynamics of traffic scenarios and improve prediction precision, especially in complex environments. The proposed model showcases strong potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.
Amortized Network Intervention to Steer the Excitatory Point Processes
We tackle the challenge of large-scale network intervention for guiding excitatory point processes, such as infectious disease spread or traffic congestion control. Our model-based reinforcement learning utilizes neural ODEs to capture how the networked excitatory point processes will evolve subject to the time-varying changes in network topology. Our approach incorporates Gradient-Descent based Model Predictive Control (GD-MPC), offering policy flexibility to accommodate prior knowledge and constraints. To address the intricacies of planning and overcome the high dimensionality inherent to such decision-making problems, we design an Amortize Network Interventions (ANI) framework, allowing for the pooling of optimal policies from history and other contexts, while ensuring a permutation equivalent property. This property enables efficient knowledge transfer and sharing across diverse contexts. Our approach has broad applications, from curbing infectious disease spread to reducing carbon emissions through traffic light optimization, and thus has the potential to address critical societal and environmental challenges.
IncidentNet: Traffic Incident Detection, Localization and Severity Estimation with Sparse Sensing
Prior art in traffic incident detection relies on high sensor coverage and is primarily based on decision-tree and random forest models that have limited representation capacity and, as a result, cannot detect incidents with high accuracy. This paper presents IncidentNet - a novel approach for classifying, localizing, and estimating the severity of traffic incidents using deep learning models trained on data captured from sparsely placed sensors in urban environments. Our model works on microscopic traffic data that can be collected using cameras installed at traffic intersections. Due to the unavailability of datasets that provide microscopic traffic details and traffic incident details simultaneously, we also present a methodology to generate a synthetic microscopic traffic dataset that matches given macroscopic traffic data. IncidentNet achieves a traffic incident detection rate of 98%, with false alarm rates of less than 7% in 197 seconds on average in urban environments with cameras on less than 20% of the traffic intersections.
Boosting Large-scale Parallel Training Efficiency with C4: A Communication-Driven Approach
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of parallel training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, we have found that the efficiency of current parallel training is often suboptimal, largely due to the following two main issues. Firstly, hardware failures are inevitable, leading to interruptions in the training tasks. The inability to quickly identify the faulty components results in a substantial waste of GPU resources. Secondly, since GPUs must wait for parameter synchronization to complete before proceeding to the next round of computation, network congestions can greatly increase the waiting time for GPUs. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are two folds. First, in parallel training, collective communication exhibits periodic and homogeneous characteristics, so any anomalies are certainly due to some form of hardware malfunction. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving few large flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing network congestion. C4 has been extensively implemented across our production systems, cutting error-induced overhead by roughly 30% and enhancing runtime performance by about 15% for certain applications with moderate communication costs.
Decentralized and Self-adaptive Core Maintenance on Temporal Graphs
Key graph-based problems play a central role in understanding network topology and uncovering patterns of similarity in homogeneous and temporal data. Such patterns can be revealed by analyzing communities formed by nodes, which in turn can be effectively modeled through temporal k-cores. This paper introduces a novel decentralized and incremental algorithm for computing the core decomposition of temporal networks. Decentralized solutions leverage the ability of network nodes to communicate and coordinate locally, addressing complex problems in a scalable, adaptive, and timely manner. By leveraging previously computed coreness values, our approach significantly reduces the activation of nodes and the volume of message exchanges when the network changes over time. This enables scalability with only a minimal trade-off in precision. Experimental evaluations on large real-world networks under varying levels of dynamism demonstrate the efficiency of our solution compared to a state-of-the-art approach, particularly in terms of active nodes, communication overhead, and convergence speed.
One Stack to Rule them All: To Drive Automated Vehicles, and Reach for the 4th level
Most automated driving functions are designed for a specific task or vehicle. Most often, the underlying architecture is fixed to specific algorithms to increase performance. Therefore, it is not possible to deploy new modules and algorithms easily. In this paper, we present our automated driving stack which combines both scalability and adaptability. Due to the modular design, our stack allows for a fast integration and testing of novel and state-of-the-art research approaches. Furthermore, it is flexible to be used for our different testing vehicles, including modified EasyMile EZ10 shuttles and different passenger cars. These vehicles differ in multiple ways, e.g. sensor setups, control systems, maximum speed, or steering angle limitations. Finally, our stack is deployed in real world environments, including passenger transport in urban areas. Our stack includes all components needed for operating an autonomous vehicle, including localization, perception, planning, controller, and additional safety modules. Our stack is developed, tested, and evaluated in real world traffic in multiple test sites, including the Test Area Autonomous Driving Baden-W\"urttemberg.
Liquid Neural Network-based Adaptive Learning vs. Incremental Learning for Link Load Prediction amid Concept Drift due to Network Failures
Adapting to concept drift is a challenging task in machine learning, which is usually tackled using incremental learning techniques that periodically re-fit a learning model leveraging newly available data. A primary limitation of these techniques is their reliance on substantial amounts of data for retraining. The necessity of acquiring fresh data introduces temporal delays prior to retraining, potentially rendering the models inaccurate if a sudden concept drift occurs in-between two consecutive retrainings. In communication networks, such issue emerges when performing traffic forecasting following a~failure event: post-failure re-routing may induce a drastic shift in distribution and pattern of traffic data, thus requiring a timely model adaptation. In this work, we address this challenge for the problem of traffic forecasting and propose an approach that exploits adaptive learning algorithms, namely, liquid neural networks, which are capable of self-adaptation to abrupt changes in data patterns without requiring any retraining. Through extensive simulations of failure scenarios, we compare the predictive performance of our proposed approach to that of a reference method based on incremental learning. Experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms incremental learning-based methods in situations where the shifts in traffic patterns are drastic.
MTGS: Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting
Multi-traversal data, commonly collected through daily commutes or by self-driving fleets, provides multiple viewpoints for scene reconstruction within a road block. This data offers significant potential for high-quality novel view synthesis, which is crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicle simulators. However, inherent challenges in multi-traversal data often result in suboptimal reconstruction quality, including variations in appearance and the presence of dynamic objects. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting (MTGS), a novel approach that reconstructs high-quality driving scenes from arbitrarily collected multi-traversal data by modeling a shared static geometry while separately handling dynamic elements and appearance variations. Our method employs a multi-traversal dynamic scene graph with a shared static node and traversal-specific dynamic nodes, complemented by color correction nodes with learnable spherical harmonics coefficient residuals. This approach enables high-fidelity novel view synthesis and provides flexibility to navigate any viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale driving dataset, nuPlan, with multi-traversal data. Our results demonstrate that MTGS improves LPIPS by 23.5% and geometry accuracy by 46.3% compared to single-traversal baselines. The code and data would be available to the public.
Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs
We present a new approach for the approximate K-nearest neighbor search based on navigable small world graphs with controllable hierarchy (Hierarchical NSW, HNSW). The proposed solution is fully graph-based, without any need for additional search structures, which are typically used at the coarse search stage of the most proximity graph techniques. Hierarchical NSW incrementally builds a multi-layer structure consisting from hierarchical set of proximity graphs (layers) for nested subsets of the stored elements. The maximum layer in which an element is present is selected randomly with an exponentially decaying probability distribution. This allows producing graphs similar to the previously studied Navigable Small World (NSW) structures while additionally having the links separated by their characteristic distance scales. Starting search from the upper layer together with utilizing the scale separation boosts the performance compared to NSW and allows a logarithmic complexity scaling. Additional employment of a heuristic for selecting proximity graph neighbors significantly increases performance at high recall and in case of highly clustered data. Performance evaluation has demonstrated that the proposed general metric space search index is able to strongly outperform previous opensource state-of-the-art vector-only approaches. Similarity of the algorithm to the skip list structure allows straightforward balanced distributed implementation.
Accident Risk Prediction based on Heterogeneous Sparse Data: New Dataset and Insights
Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge, therefore, accident analysis and prediction has been a topic of much research over the past few decades. Using small-scale datasets with limited coverage, being dependent on extensive set of data, and being not applicable for real-time purposes are the important shortcomings of the existing studies. To address these challenges, we propose a new solution for real-time traffic accident prediction using easy-to-obtain, but sparse data. Our solution relies on a deep-neural-network model (which we have named DAP, for Deep Accident Prediction); which utilizes a variety of data attributes such as traffic events, weather data, points-of-interest, and time. DAP incorporates multiple components including a recurrent (for time-sensitive data), a fully connected (for time-insensitive data), and a trainable embedding component (to capture spatial heterogeneity). To fill the data gap, we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. By employing the US-Accidents dataset and through an extensive set of experiments across several large cities, we have evaluated our proposal against several baselines. Our analysis and results show significant improvements to predict rare accident events. Further, we have shown the impact of traffic information, time, and points-of-interest data for real-time accident prediction.
Theoretical bounds on the network community profile from low-rank semi-definite programming
We study a new connection between a technical measure called mu-conductance that arises in the study of Markov chains for sampling convex bodies and the network community profile that characterizes size-resolved properties of clusters and communities in social and information networks. The idea of mu-conductance is similar to the traditional graph conductance, but disregards sets with small volume. We derive a sequence of optimization problems including a low-rank semi-definite program from which we can derive a lower bound on the optimal mu-conductance value. These ideas give the first theoretically sound bound on the behavior of the network community profile for a wide range of cluster sizes. The algorithm scales up to graphs with hundreds of thousands of nodes and we demonstrate how our framework validates the predicted structures of real-world graphs.
Robo-taxi Fleet Coordination at Scale via Reinforcement Learning
Fleets of robo-taxis offering on-demand transportation services, commonly known as Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, hold significant promise for societal benefits, such as reducing pollution, energy consumption, and urban congestion. However, orchestrating these systems at scale remains a critical challenge, with existing coordination algorithms often failing to exploit the systems' full potential. This work introduces a novel decision-making framework that unites mathematical modeling with data-driven techniques. In particular, we present the AMoD coordination problem through the lens of reinforcement learning and propose a graph network-based framework that exploits the main strengths of graph representation learning, reinforcement learning, and classical operations research tools. Extensive evaluations across diverse simulation fidelities and scenarios demonstrate the flexibility of our approach, achieving superior system performance, computational efficiency, and generalizability compared to prior methods. Finally, motivated by the need to democratize research efforts in this area, we release publicly available benchmarks, datasets, and simulators for network-level coordination alongside an open-source codebase designed to provide accessible simulation platforms and establish a standardized validation process for comparing methodologies. Code available at: https://github.com/StanfordASL/RL4AMOD
Roto-translated Local Coordinate Frames For Interacting Dynamical Systems
Modelling interactions is critical in learning complex dynamical systems, namely systems of interacting objects with highly non-linear and time-dependent behaviour. A large class of such systems can be formalized as geometric graphs, i.e., graphs with nodes positioned in the Euclidean space given an arbitrarily chosen global coordinate system, for instance vehicles in a traffic scene. Notwithstanding the arbitrary global coordinate system, the governing dynamics of the respective dynamical systems are invariant to rotations and translations, also known as Galilean invariance. As ignoring these invariances leads to worse generalization, in this work we propose local coordinate frames per node-object to induce roto-translation invariance to the geometric graph of the interacting dynamical system. Further, the local coordinate frames allow for a natural definition of anisotropic filtering in graph neural networks. Experiments in traffic scenes, 3D motion capture, and colliding particles demonstrate that the proposed approach comfortably outperforms the recent state-of-the-art.
Multi-V2X: A Large Scale Multi-modal Multi-penetration-rate Dataset for Cooperative Perception
Cooperative perception through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to overcome occlusions and enhance long-distance perception. Great achievements have been made in both datasets and algorithms. However, existing real-world datasets are limited by the presence of few communicable agents, while synthetic datasets typically cover only vehicles. More importantly, the penetration rate of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) , a critical factor for the deployment of cooperative perception technologies, has not been adequately addressed. To tackle these issues, we introduce Multi-V2X, a large-scale, multi-modal, multi-penetration-rate dataset for V2X perception. By co-simulating SUMO and CARLA, we equip a substantial number of cars and roadside units (RSUs) in simulated towns with sensor suites, and collect comprehensive sensing data. Datasets with specified CAV penetration rates can be obtained by masking some equipped cars as normal vehicles. In total, our Multi-V2X dataset comprises 549k RGB frames, 146k LiDAR frames, and 4,219k annotated 3D bounding boxes across six categories. The highest possible CAV penetration rate reaches 86.21%, with up to 31 agents in communication range, posing new challenges in selecting agents to collaborate with. We provide comprehensive benchmarks for cooperative 3D object detection tasks. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/RadetzkyLi/Multi-V2X .
Dynamic Neural Network for Multi-Task Learning Searching across Diverse Network Topologies
In this paper, we present a new MTL framework that searches for structures optimized for multiple tasks with diverse graph topologies and shares features among tasks. We design a restricted DAG-based central network with read-in/read-out layers to build topologically diverse task-adaptive structures while limiting search space and time. We search for a single optimized network that serves as multiple task adaptive sub-networks using our three-stage training process. To make the network compact and discretized, we propose a flow-based reduction algorithm and a squeeze loss used in the training process. We evaluate our optimized network on various public MTL datasets and show ours achieves state-of-the-art performance. An extensive ablation study experimentally validates the effectiveness of the sub-module and schemes in our framework.
STU-Net: Scalable and Transferable Medical Image Segmentation Models Empowered by Large-Scale Supervised Pre-training
Large-scale models pre-trained on large-scale datasets have profoundly advanced the development of deep learning. However, the state-of-the-art models for medical image segmentation are still small-scale, with their parameters only in the tens of millions. Further scaling them up to higher orders of magnitude is rarely explored. An overarching goal of exploring large-scale models is to train them on large-scale medical segmentation datasets for better transfer capacities. In this work, we design a series of Scalable and Transferable U-Net (STU-Net) models, with parameter sizes ranging from 14 million to 1.4 billion. Notably, the 1.4B STU-Net is the largest medical image segmentation model to date. Our STU-Net is based on nnU-Net framework due to its popularity and impressive performance. We first refine the default convolutional blocks in nnU-Net to make them scalable. Then, we empirically evaluate different scaling combinations of network depth and width, discovering that it is optimal to scale model depth and width together. We train our scalable STU-Net models on a large-scale TotalSegmentator dataset and find that increasing model size brings a stronger performance gain. This observation reveals that a large model is promising in medical image segmentation. Furthermore, we evaluate the transferability of our model on 14 downstream datasets for direct inference and 3 datasets for further fine-tuning, covering various modalities and segmentation targets. We observe good performance of our pre-trained model in both direct inference and fine-tuning. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Ziyan-Huang/STU-Net.
TrafficGPT: Breaking the Token Barrier for Efficient Long Traffic Analysis and Generation
Over the years, network traffic analysis and generation have advanced significantly. From traditional statistical methods, the field has progressed to sophisticated deep learning techniques. This progress has improved the ability to detect complex patterns and security threats, as well as to test and optimize network performance. However, obstacles persist, such as the dependence on labeled data for analysis and the difficulty of generating traffic samples that follow realistic patterns. Pre-trained deep neural networks have emerged as powerful tools to resolve these issues, offering improved performance by learning robust data representations from large unlabeled datasets. Despite their benefits, existing pre-trained models face challenges like token length limitation, which restricts their usefulness in comprehensive traffic analysis and realistic traffic generation. To address these challenges, we introduce TrafficGPT, a deep learning model that can tackle complex challenges related to long flow classification and generation tasks. This model uses generative pre-training with the linear attention mechanism, which allows for a substantially increased capacity of up to 12,032 tokens from the previous limit of only 512 tokens. TrafficGPT demonstrates superior performance in classification tasks, reaching state-of-the-art levels. In generation tasks, it closely resembles real traffic flows, with low JS divergence and an F1 score close to 0.5 (representing a random guess) in discriminating generated data. These advancements hold promise for future applications in both traffic flow classification and generation tasks.
Model Context Protocols in Adaptive Transport Systems: A Survey
The rapid expansion of interconnected devices, autonomous systems, and AI applications has created severe fragmentation in adaptive transport systems, where diverse protocols and context sources remain isolated. This survey provides the first systematic investigation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a unifying paradigm, highlighting its ability to bridge protocol-level adaptation with context-aware decision making. Analyzing established literature, we show that existing efforts have implicitly converged toward MCP-like architectures, signaling a natural evolution from fragmented solutions to standardized integration frameworks. We propose a five-category taxonomy covering adaptive mechanisms, context-aware frameworks, unification models, integration strategies, and MCP-enabled architectures. Our findings reveal three key insights: traditional transport protocols have reached the limits of isolated adaptation, MCP's client-server and JSON-RPC structure enables semantic interoperability, and AI-driven transport demands integration paradigms uniquely suited to MCP. Finally, we present a research roadmap positioning MCP as a foundation for next-generation adaptive, context-aware, and intelligent transport infrastructures.
Multiagent Multitraversal Multimodal Self-Driving: Open MARS Dataset
Large-scale datasets have fueled recent advancements in AI-based autonomous vehicle research. However, these datasets are usually collected from a single vehicle's one-time pass of a certain location, lacking multiagent interactions or repeated traversals of the same place. Such information could lead to transformative enhancements in autonomous vehicles' perception, prediction, and planning capabilities. To bridge this gap, in collaboration with the self-driving company May Mobility, we present the MARS dataset which unifies scenarios that enable MultiAgent, multitraveRSal, and multimodal autonomous vehicle research. More specifically, MARS is collected with a fleet of autonomous vehicles driving within a certain geographical area. Each vehicle has its own route and different vehicles may appear at nearby locations. Each vehicle is equipped with a LiDAR and surround-view RGB cameras. We curate two subsets in MARS: one facilitates collaborative driving with multiple vehicles simultaneously present at the same location, and the other enables memory retrospection through asynchronous traversals of the same location by multiple vehicles. We conduct experiments in place recognition and neural reconstruction. More importantly, MARS introduces new research opportunities and challenges such as multitraversal 3D reconstruction, multiagent perception, and unsupervised object discovery. Our data and codes can be found at https://ai4ce.github.io/MARS/.
TSBOW: Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded Vehicles Under Various Weather Conditions
Global warming has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, which degrade CCTV signal and video quality while disrupting traffic flow, thereby increasing traffic accident rates. Existing datasets, often limited to light haze, rain, and snow, fail to capture extreme weather conditions. To address this gap, this study introduces the Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded vehicles under various Weather conditions (TSBOW), a comprehensive dataset designed to enhance occluded vehicle detection across diverse annual weather scenarios. Comprising over 32 hours of real-world traffic data from densely populated urban areas, TSBOW includes more than 48,000 manually annotated and 3.2 million semi-labeled frames; bounding boxes spanning eight traffic participant classes from large vehicles to micromobility devices and pedestrians. We establish an object detection benchmark for TSBOW, highlighting challenges posed by occlusions and adverse weather. With its varied road types, scales, and viewpoints, TSBOW serves as a critical resource for advancing Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our findings underscore the potential of CCTV-based traffic monitoring, pave the way for new research and applications. The TSBOW dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/SKKUAutoLab/TSBOW.
Semantic Edge-Cloud Communication for Real-Time Urban Traffic Surveillance with ViT and LLMs over Mobile Networks
Real-time urban traffic surveillance is vital for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to ensure road safety, optimize traffic flow, track vehicle trajectories, and prevent collisions in smart cities. Deploying edge cameras across urban environments is a standard practice for monitoring road conditions. However, integrating these with intelligent models requires a robust understanding of dynamic traffic scenarios and a responsive interface for user interaction. Although multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) can interpret traffic images and generate informative responses, their deployment on edge devices is infeasible due to high computational demands. Therefore, LLM inference must occur on the cloud, necessitating visual data transmission from edge to cloud, a process hindered by limited bandwidth, leading to potential delays that compromise real-time performance. To address this challenge, we propose a semantic communication framework that significantly reduces transmission overhead. Our method involves detecting Regions of Interest (RoIs) using YOLOv11, cropping relevant image segments, and converting them into compact embedding vectors using a Vision Transformer (ViT). These embeddings are then transmitted to the cloud, where an image decoder reconstructs the cropped images. The reconstructed images are processed by a multimodal LLM to generate traffic condition descriptions. This approach achieves a 99.9% reduction in data transmission size while maintaining an LLM response accuracy of 89% for reconstructed cropped images, compared to 93% accuracy with original cropped images. Our results demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of ViT and LLM-assisted edge-cloud semantic communication for real-time traffic surveillance.
Towards Quantifying Long-Range Interactions in Graph Machine Learning: a Large Graph Dataset and a Measurement
Long-range dependencies are critical for effective graph representation learning, yet most existing datasets focus on small graphs tailored to inductive tasks, offering limited insight into long-range interactions. Current evaluations primarily compare models employing global attention (e.g., graph transformers) with those using local neighborhood aggregation (e.g., message-passing neural networks) without a direct measurement of long-range dependency. In this work, we introduce City-Networks, a novel large-scale transductive learning dataset derived from real-world city roads. This dataset features graphs with over 10^5 nodes and significantly larger diameters than those in existing benchmarks, naturally embodying long-range information. We annotate the graphs using an eccentricity-based approach, ensuring that the classification task inherently requires information from distant nodes. Furthermore, we propose a model-agnostic measurement based on the Jacobians of neighbors from distant hops, offering a principled quantification of long-range dependencies. Finally, we provide theoretical justifications for both our dataset design and the proposed measurement - particularly by focusing on over-smoothing and influence score dilution - which establishes a robust foundation for further exploration of long-range interactions in graph neural networks.
CaRL: Learning Scalable Planning Policies with Simple Rewards
We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does not suffer from compounding errors like imitation learning. Contemporary RL approaches for driving use complex shaped rewards that sum multiple individual rewards, \eg~progress, position, or orientation rewards. We show that PPO fails to optimize a popular version of these rewards when the mini-batch size is increased, which limits the scalability of these approaches. Instead, we propose a new reward design based primarily on optimizing a single intuitive reward term: route completion. Infractions are penalized by terminating the episode or multiplicatively reducing route completion. We find that PPO scales well with higher mini-batch sizes when trained with our simple reward, even improving performance. Training with large mini-batch sizes enables efficient scaling via distributed data parallelism. We scale PPO to 300M samples in CARLA and 500M samples in nuPlan with a single 8-GPU node. The resulting model achieves 64 DS on the CARLA longest6 v2 benchmark, outperforming other RL methods with more complex rewards by a large margin. Requiring only minimal adaptations from its use in CARLA, the same method is the best learning-based approach on nuPlan. It scores 91.3 in non-reactive and 90.6 in reactive traffic on the Val14 benchmark while being an order of magnitude faster than prior work.
A hybrid deep-learning-metaheuristic framework for bi-level network design problems
This study proposes a hybrid deep-learning-metaheuristic framework with a bi-level architecture for road network design problems (NDPs). We train a graph neural network (GNN) to approximate the solution of the user equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment problem and use inferences made by the trained model to calculate fitness function evaluations of a genetic algorithm (GA) to approximate solutions for NDPs. Using three test networks, two NDP variants and an exact solver as benchmark, we show that on average, our proposed framework can provide solutions within 1.5% gap of the best results in less than 0.5% of the time used by the exact solution procedure. Our framework can be utilized within an expert system for infrastructure planning to determine the best infrastructure planning and management decisions under different scenarios. Given the flexibility of the framework, it can easily be adapted to many other decision problems that can be modeled as bi-level problems on graphs. Moreover, we foreseen interesting future research directions, thus we also put forward a brief research agenda for this topic. The key observation from our research that can shape future research is that the fitness function evaluation time using the inferences made by the GNN model was in the order of milliseconds, which points to an opportunity and a need for novel heuristics that 1) can cope well with noisy fitness function values provided by deep learning models, and 2) can use the significantly enlarged efficiency of the evaluation step to explore the search space effectively (rather than efficiently). This opens a new avenue for a modern class of metaheuristics that are crafted for use with AI-powered predictors.
AgentsNet: Coordination and Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs
Large-language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful problem-solving capabilities, in particular when organized in multi-agent systems. However, the advent of such systems also raises several questions on the ability of a complex network of agents to effectively self-organize and collaborate. While measuring performance on standard reasoning benchmarks indicates how well multi-agent systems can solve reasoning tasks, it is unclear whether these systems are able to leverage their topology effectively. Here, we propose AgentsNet, a new benchmark for multi-agent reasoning. By drawing inspiration from classical problems in distributed systems and graph theory, AgentsNet measures the ability of multi-agent systems to collaboratively form strategies for problem-solving, self-organization, and effective communication given a network topology. We evaluate a variety of baseline methods on AgentsNet including homogeneous networks of agents which first have to agree on basic protocols for organization and communication. We find that some frontier LLMs are already demonstrating strong performance for small networks but begin to fall off once the size of the network scales. While existing multi-agent benchmarks cover at most 2-5 agents, AgentsNet is practically unlimited in size and can scale with new generations of LLMs. As such, we also probe frontier models in a setup with up to 100 agents.
HiGen: Hierarchical Graph Generative Networks
Most real-world graphs exhibit a hierarchical structure, which is often overlooked by existing graph generation methods. To address this limitation, we propose a novel graph generative network that captures the hierarchical nature of graphs and successively generates the graph sub-structures in a coarse-to-fine fashion. At each level of hierarchy, this model generates communities in parallel, followed by the prediction of cross-edges between communities using separate neural networks. This modular approach enables scalable graph generation for large and complex graphs. Moreover, we model the output distribution of edges in the hierarchical graph with a multinomial distribution and derive a recursive factorization for this distribution. This enables us to generate community graphs with integer-valued edge weights in an autoregressive manner. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed generative model, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of graph quality across various benchmark datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Karami-m/HiGen_main.
Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Agent-based Transportation Simulation
MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.
Self-Dimensioning and Planning of Small Cell Capacity in Multitenant 5G Networks
An important concept in the fifth generation of mobile networks is multitenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, installing small cells is an effective resource to provide greater performance and capacity to both indoor and outdoor places. This paper proposes a new framework for automated cell planning in multitenant small cell networks. In particular, taking advantage of the available network data, a set of detailed planning specifications over time and space domains are generated in order to meet the contracted capacity by each tenant. Then, the network infrastructure and configuration are updated according to an algorithm that considers different actions such as adding/removing channels and adding or relocating small cells. The simulation results show the effectiveness of various methods to derive the planning specifications depending on the correlation between the tenant's and network's traffic demands.
Landscaping Linear Mode Connectivity
The presence of linear paths in parameter space between two different network solutions in certain cases, i.e., linear mode connectivity (LMC), has garnered interest from both theoretical and practical fronts. There has been significant research that either practically designs algorithms catered for connecting networks by adjusting for the permutation symmetries as well as some others that more theoretically construct paths through which networks can be connected. Yet, the core reasons for the occurrence of LMC, when in fact it does occur, in the highly non-convex loss landscapes of neural networks are far from clear. In this work, we take a step towards understanding it by providing a model of how the loss landscape needs to behave topographically for LMC (or the lack thereof) to manifest. Concretely, we present a `mountainside and ridge' perspective that helps to neatly tie together different geometric features that can be spotted in the loss landscape along the training runs. We also complement this perspective by providing a theoretical analysis of the barrier height, for which we provide empirical support, and which additionally extends as a faithful predictor of layer-wise LMC. We close with a toy example that provides further intuition on how barriers arise in the first place, all in all, showcasing the larger aim of the work -- to provide a working model of the landscape and its topography for the occurrence of LMC.
TOMD: A Trail-based Off-road Multimodal Dataset for Traversable Pathway Segmentation under Challenging Illumination Conditions
Detecting traversable pathways in unstructured outdoor environments remains a significant challenge for autonomous robots, especially in critical applications such as wide-area search and rescue, as well as incident management scenarios like forest fires. Existing datasets and models primarily target urban settings or wide, vehicle-traversable off-road tracks, leaving a substantial gap in addressing the complexity of narrow, trail-like off-road scenarios. To address this, we introduce the Trail-based Off-road Multimodal Dataset (TOMD), a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for such environments. TOMD features high-fidelity multimodal sensor data -- including 128-channel LiDAR, stereo imagery, GNSS, IMU, and illumination measurements -- collected through repeated traversals under diverse conditions. We also propose a dynamic multiscale data fusion model for accurate traversable pathway prediction. The study analyzes the performance of early, cross, and mixed fusion strategies under varying illumination levels. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the relevance of illumination in segmentation performance. We publicly release TOMD at https://github.com/yyyxs1125/TMOD to support future research in trail-based off-road navigation.
The Urban Vision Hackathon Dataset and Models: Towards Image Annotations and Accurate Vision Models for Indian Traffic
This report describes the UVH-26 dataset, the first public release by AIM@IISc of a large-scale dataset of annotated traffic-camera images from India. The dataset comprises 26,646 high-resolution (1080p) images sampled from 2800 Bengaluru's Safe-City CCTV cameras over a 4-week period, and subsequently annotated through a crowdsourced hackathon involving 565 college students from across India. In total, 1.8 million bounding boxes were labeled across 14 vehicle classes specific to India: Cycle, 2-Wheeler (Motorcycle), 3-Wheeler (Auto-rickshaw), LCV (Light Commercial Vehicles), Van, Tempo-traveller, Hatchback, Sedan, SUV, MUV, Mini-bus, Bus, Truck and Other. Of these, 283k-316k consensus ground truth bounding boxes and labels were derived for distinct objects in the 26k images using Majority Voting and STAPLE algorithms. Further, we train multiple contemporary detectors, including YOLO11-S/X, RT-DETR-S/X, and DAMO-YOLO-T/L using these datasets, and report accuracy based on mAP50, mAP75 and mAP50:95. Models trained on UVH-26 achieve 8.4-31.5% improvements in mAP50:95 over equivalent baseline models trained on COCO dataset, with RT-DETR-X showing the best performance at 0.67 (mAP50:95) as compared to 0.40 for COCO-trained weights for common classes (Car, Bus, and Truck). This demonstrates the benefits of domain-specific training data for Indian traffic scenarios. The release package provides the 26k images with consensus annotations based on Majority Voting (UVH-26-MV) and STAPLE (UVH-26-ST) and the 6 fine-tuned YOLO and DETR models on each of these datasets. By capturing the heterogeneity of Indian urban mobility directly from operational traffic-camera streams, UVH-26 addresses a critical gap in existing global benchmarks, and offers a foundation for advancing detection, classification, and deployment of intelligent transportation systems in emerging nations with complex traffic conditions.
Redesigning Multi-Scale Neural Network for Crowd Counting
Perspective distortions and crowd variations make crowd counting a challenging task in computer vision. To tackle it, many previous works have used multi-scale architecture in deep neural networks (DNNs). Multi-scale branches can be either directly merged (e.g. by concatenation) or merged through the guidance of proxies (e.g. attentions) in the DNNs. Despite their prevalence, these combination methods are not sophisticated enough to deal with the per-pixel performance discrepancy over multi-scale density maps. In this work, we redesign the multi-scale neural network by introducing a hierarchical mixture of density experts, which hierarchically merges multi-scale density maps for crowd counting. Within the hierarchical structure, an expert competition and collaboration scheme is presented to encourage contributions from all scales; pixel-wise soft gating nets are introduced to provide pixel-wise soft weights for scale combinations in different hierarchies. The network is optimized using both the crowd density map and the local counting map, where the latter is obtained by local integration on the former. Optimizing both can be problematic because of their potential conflicts. We introduce a new relative local counting loss based on relative count differences among hard-predicted local regions in an image, which proves to be complementary to the conventional absolute error loss on the density map. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five public datasets, i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, JHU-CROWD++, NWPU-Crowd and Trancos.
Getting SMARTER for Motion Planning in Autonomous Driving Systems
Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous driving and perhaps the most challenging to comprehensively evaluate because of the associated risks and expenses of real-world deployment. Therefore, simulations play an important role in efficient development of planning algorithms. To be effective, simulations must be accurate and realistic, both in terms of dynamics and behavior modeling, and also highly customizable in order to accommodate a broad spectrum of research frameworks. In this paper, we introduce SMARTS 2.0, the second generation of our motion planning simulator which, in addition to being highly optimized for large-scale simulation, provides many new features, such as realistic map integration, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, traffic and pedestrian simulation, and a broad variety of sensor models. Moreover, we present a novel benchmark suite for evaluating planning algorithms in various highly challenging scenarios, including interactive driving, such as turning at intersections, and adaptive driving, in which the task is to closely follow a lead vehicle without any explicit knowledge of its intention. Each scenario is characterized by a variety of traffic patterns and road structures. We further propose a series of common and task-specific metrics to effectively evaluate the performance of the planning algorithms. At the end, we evaluate common motion planning algorithms using the proposed benchmark and highlight the challenges the proposed scenarios impose. The new SMARTS 2.0 features and the benchmark are publicly available at github.com/huawei-noah/SMARTS.
STARN-GAT: A Multi-Modal Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network for Accident Severity Prediction
Accurate prediction of traffic accident severity is critical for improving road safety, optimizing emergency response strategies, and informing the design of safer transportation infrastructure. However, existing approaches often struggle to effectively model the intricate interdependencies among spatial, temporal, and contextual variables that govern accident outcomes. In this study, we introduce STARN-GAT, a Multi-Modal Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network, which leverages adaptive graph construction and modality-aware attention mechanisms to capture these complex relationships. Unlike conventional methods, STARN-GAT integrates road network topology, temporal traffic patterns, and environmental context within a unified attention-based framework. The model is evaluated on the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset, achieving a Macro F1-score of 85 percent, ROC-AUC of 0.91, and recall of 81 percent for severe incidents. To ensure generalizability within the South Asian context, STARN-GAT is further validated on the ARI-BUET traffic accident dataset, where it attains a Macro F1-score of 0.84, recall of 0.78, and ROC-AUC of 0.89. These results demonstrate the model's effectiveness in identifying high-risk cases and its potential for deployment in real-time, safety-critical traffic management systems. Furthermore, the attention-based architecture enhances interpretability, offering insights into contributing factors and supporting trust in AI-assisted decision-making. Overall, STARN-GAT bridges the gap between advanced graph neural network techniques and practical applications in road safety analytics.
RampNet: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Bootstrapping Curb Ramp Detection in Streetscape Images from Open Government Metadata
Curb ramps are critical for urban accessibility, but robustly detecting them in images remains an open problem due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets. While prior work has attempted to improve data availability with crowdsourced or manually labeled data, these efforts often fall short in either quality or scale. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a two-stage pipeline called RampNet to scale curb ramp detection datasets and improve model performance. In Stage 1, we generate a dataset of more than 210,000 annotated Google Street View (GSV) panoramas by auto-translating government-provided curb ramp location data to pixel coordinates in panoramic images. In Stage 2, we train a curb ramp detection model (modified ConvNeXt V2) from the generated dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance. To evaluate both stages of our pipeline, we compare to manually labeled panoramas. Our generated dataset achieves 94.0% precision and 92.5% recall, and our detection model reaches 0.9236 AP -- far exceeding prior work. Our work contributes the first large-scale, high-quality curb ramp detection dataset, benchmark, and model.
ClusterFuG: Clustering Fully connected Graphs by Multicut
We propose a graph clustering formulation based on multicut (a.k.a. weighted correlation clustering) on the complete graph. Our formulation does not need specification of the graph topology as in the original sparse formulation of multicut, making our approach simpler and potentially better performing. In contrast to unweighted correlation clustering we allow for a more expressive weighted cost structure. In dense multicut, the clustering objective is given in a factorized form as inner products of node feature vectors. This allows for an efficient formulation and inference in contrast to multicut/weighted correlation clustering, which has at least quadratic representation and computation complexity when working on the complete graph. We show how to rewrite classical greedy algorithms for multicut in our dense setting and how to modify them for greater efficiency and solution quality. In particular, our algorithms scale to graphs with tens of thousands of nodes. Empirical evidence on instance segmentation on Cityscapes and clustering of ImageNet datasets shows the merits of our approach.
Dual-Modality Vehicle Anomaly Detection via Bilateral Trajectory Tracing
Traffic anomaly detection has played a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The main challenges of this task lie in the highly diversified anomaly scenes and variational lighting conditions. Although much work has managed to identify the anomaly in homogenous weather and scene, few resolved to cope with complex ones. In this paper, we proposed a dual-modality modularized methodology for the robust detection of abnormal vehicles. We introduced an integrated anomaly detection framework comprising the following modules: background modeling, vehicle tracking with detection, mask construction, Region of Interest (ROI) backtracking, and dual-modality tracing. Concretely, we employed background modeling to filter the motion information and left the static information for later vehicle detection. For the vehicle detection and tracking module, we adopted YOLOv5 and multi-scale tracking to localize the anomalies. Besides, we utilized the frame difference and tracking results to identify the road and obtain the mask. In addition, we introduced multiple similarity estimation metrics to refine the anomaly period via backtracking. Finally, we proposed a dual-modality bilateral tracing module to refine the time further. The experiments conducted on the Track 4 testset of the NVIDIA 2021 AI City Challenge yielded a result of 0.9302 F1-Score and 3.4039 root mean square error (RMSE), indicating the effectiveness of our framework.
The Impact of Task Underspecification in Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning
Evaluations of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods are an integral part of scientific progress of the field. Beyond designing DRL methods for general intelligence, designing task-specific methods is becoming increasingly prominent for real-world applications. In these settings, the standard evaluation practice involves using a few instances of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to represent the task. However, many tasks induce a large family of MDPs owing to variations in the underlying environment, particularly in real-world contexts. For example, in traffic signal control, variations may stem from intersection geometries and traffic flow levels. The select MDP instances may thus inadvertently cause overfitting, lacking the statistical power to draw conclusions about the method's true performance across the family. In this article, we augment DRL evaluations to consider parameterized families of MDPs. We show that in comparison to evaluating DRL methods on select MDP instances, evaluating the MDP family often yields a substantially different relative ranking of methods, casting doubt on what methods should be considered state-of-the-art. We validate this phenomenon in standard control benchmarks and the real-world application of traffic signal control. At the same time, we show that accurately evaluating on an MDP family is nontrivial. Overall, this work identifies new challenges for empirical rigor in reinforcement learning, especially as the outcomes of DRL trickle into downstream decision-making.
Multi-Scale Representations by Varying Window Attention for Semantic Segmentation
Multi-scale learning is central to semantic segmentation. We visualize the effective receptive field (ERF) of canonical multi-scale representations and point out two risks in learning them: scale inadequacy and field inactivation. A novel multi-scale learner, varying window attention (VWA), is presented to address these issues. VWA leverages the local window attention (LWA) and disentangles LWA into the query window and context window, allowing the context's scale to vary for the query to learn representations at multiple scales. However, varying the context to large-scale windows (enlarging ratio R) can significantly increase the memory footprint and computation cost (R^2 times larger than LWA). We propose a simple but professional re-scaling strategy to zero the extra induced cost without compromising performance. Consequently, VWA uses the same cost as LWA to overcome the receptive limitation of the local window. Furthermore, depending on VWA and employing various MLPs, we introduce a multi-scale decoder (MSD), VWFormer, to improve multi-scale representations for semantic segmentation. VWFormer achieves efficiency competitive with the most compute-friendly MSDs, like FPN and MLP decoder, but performs much better than any MSDs. For instance, using nearly half of UPerNet's computation, VWFormer outperforms it by 1.0%-2.5% mIoU on ADE20K. With little extra overhead, ~10G FLOPs, Mask2Former armed with VWFormer improves by 1.0%-1.3%. The code and models are available at https://github.com/yan-hao-tian/vw
Random Spatial Networks: Small Worlds without Clustering, Traveling Waves, and Hop-and-Spread Disease Dynamics
Random network models play a prominent role in modeling, analyzing and understanding complex phenomena on real-life networks. However, a key property of networks is often neglected: many real-world networks exhibit spatial structure, the tendency of a node to select neighbors with a probability depending on physical distance. Here, we introduce a class of random spatial networks (RSNs) which generalizes many existing random network models but adds spatial structure. In these networks, nodes are placed randomly in space and joined in edges with a probability depending on their distance and their individual expected degrees, in a manner that crucially remains analytically tractable. We use this network class to propose a new generalization of small-world networks, where the average shortest path lengths in the graph are small, as in classical Watts-Strogatz small-world networks, but with close spatial proximity of nodes that are neighbors in the network playing the role of large clustering. Small-world effects are demonstrated on these spatial small-world networks without clustering. We are able to derive partial integro-differential equations governing susceptible-infectious-recovered disease spreading through an RSN, and we demonstrate the existence of traveling wave solutions. If the distance kernel governing edge placement decays slower than exponential, the population-scale dynamics are dominated by long-range hops followed by local spread of traveling waves. This provides a theoretical modeling framework for recent observations of how epidemics like Ebola evolve in modern connected societies, with long-range connections seeding new focal points from which the epidemic locally spreads in a wavelike manner.
Multi-Scale Diffusion: Enhancing Spatial Layout in High-Resolution Panoramic Image Generation
Diffusion models have recently gained recognition for generating diverse and high-quality content, especially in the domain of image synthesis. These models excel not only in creating fixed-size images but also in producing panoramic images. However, existing methods often struggle with spatial layout consistency when producing high-resolution panoramas, due to the lack of guidance of the global image layout. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Scale Diffusion (MSD) framework, a plug-and-play module that extends the existing panoramic image generation framework to multiple resolution levels. By utilizing gradient descent techniques, our method effectively incorporates structural information from low-resolution images into high-resolution outputs. A comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method was conducted, comparing it with the prior works in qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms others in generating coherent high-resolution panoramas.
Data-Driven Traffic Simulation for an Intersection in a Metropolis
We present a novel data-driven simulation environment for modeling traffic in metropolitan street intersections. Using real-world tracking data collected over an extended period of time, we train trajectory forecasting models to learn agent interactions and environmental constraints that are difficult to capture conventionally. Trajectories of new agents are first coarsely generated by sampling from the spatial and temporal generative distributions, then refined using state-of-the-art trajectory forecasting models. The simulation can run either autonomously, or under explicit human control conditioned on the generative distributions. We present the experiments for a variety of model configurations. Under an iterative prediction scheme, the way-point-supervised TrajNet++ model obtained 0.36 Final Displacement Error (FDE) in 20 FPS on an NVIDIA A100 GPU.
Sampling random graph homomorphisms and applications to network data analysis
A graph homomorphism is a map between two graphs that preserves adjacency relations. We consider the problem of sampling a random graph homomorphism from a graph into a large network. We propose two complementary MCMC algorithms for sampling random graph homomorphisms and establish bounds on their mixing times and the concentration of their time averages. Based on our sampling algorithms, we propose a novel framework for network data analysis that circumvents some of the drawbacks in methods based on independent and neighborhood sampling. Various time averages of the MCMC trajectory give us various computable observables, including well-known ones such as homomorphism density and average clustering coefficient and their generalizations. Furthermore, we show that these network observables are stable with respect to a suitably renormalized cut distance between networks. We provide various examples and simulations demonstrating our framework through synthetic networks. We also demonstrate the performance of our framework on the tasks of network clustering and subgraph classification on the Facebook100 dataset and on Word Adjacency Networks of a set of classic novels.
Beyond Simulation: Benchmarking World Models for Planning and Causality in Autonomous Driving
World models have become increasingly popular in acting as learned traffic simulators. Recent work has explored replacing traditional traffic simulators with world models for policy training. In this work, we explore the robustness of existing metrics to evaluate world models as traffic simulators to see if the same metrics are suitable for evaluating a world model as a pseudo-environment for policy training. Specifically, we analyze the metametric employed by the Waymo Open Sim-Agents Challenge (WOSAC) and compare world model predictions on standard scenarios where the agents are fully or partially controlled by the world model (partial replay). Furthermore, since we are interested in evaluating the ego action-conditioned world model, we extend the standard WOSAC evaluation domain to include agents that are causal to the ego vehicle. Our evaluations reveal a significant number of scenarios where top-ranking models perform well under no perturbation but fail when the ego agent is forced to replay the original trajectory. To address these cases, we propose new metrics to highlight the sensitivity of world models to uncontrollable objects and evaluate the performance of world models as pseudo-environments for policy training and analyze some state-of-the-art world models under these new metrics.
Knowledge-Informed Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction at Signalized Intersections for Infrastructure-to-Everything
Multi-agent trajectory prediction at signalized intersections is crucial for developing efficient intelligent transportation systems and safe autonomous driving systems. Due to the complexity of intersection scenarios and the limitations of single-vehicle perception, the performance of vehicle-centric prediction methods has reached a plateau. In this paper, we introduce an Infrastructure-to-Everything (I2X) collaborative prediction scheme. In this scheme, roadside units (RSUs) independently forecast the future trajectories of all vehicles and transmit these predictions unidirectionally to subscribing vehicles. Building on this scheme, we propose I2XTraj, a dedicated infrastructure-based trajectory prediction model. I2XTraj leverages real-time traffic signal states, prior maneuver strategy knowledge, and multi-agent interactions to generate accurate, joint multi-modal trajectory prediction. First, a continuous signal-informed mechanism is proposed to adaptively process real-time traffic signals to guide trajectory proposal generation under varied intersection configurations. Second, a driving strategy awareness mechanism estimates the joint distribution of maneuver strategies by integrating spatial priors of intersection areas with dynamic vehicle states, enabling coverage of the full set of feasible maneuvers. Third, a spatial-temporal-mode attention network models multi-agent interactions to refine and adjust joint trajectory outputs.Finally, I2XTraj is evaluated on two real-world datasets of signalized intersections, the V2X-Seq and the SinD drone dataset. In both single-infrastructure and online collaborative scenarios, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 30\% on V2X-Seq and 15\% on SinD, demonstrating strong generalizability and robustness.
Spatial As Deep: Spatial CNN for Traffic Scene Understanding
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are usually built by stacking convolutional operations layer-by-layer. Although CNN has shown strong capability to extract semantics from raw pixels, its capacity to capture spatial relationships of pixels across rows and columns of an image is not fully explored. These relationships are important to learn semantic objects with strong shape priors but weak appearance coherences, such as traffic lanes, which are often occluded or not even painted on the road surface as shown in Fig. 1 (a). In this paper, we propose Spatial CNN (SCNN), which generalizes traditional deep layer-by-layer convolutions to slice-byslice convolutions within feature maps, thus enabling message passings between pixels across rows and columns in a layer. Such SCNN is particular suitable for long continuous shape structure or large objects, with strong spatial relationship but less appearance clues, such as traffic lanes, poles, and wall. We apply SCNN on a newly released very challenging traffic lane detection dataset and Cityscapse dataset. The results show that SCNN could learn the spatial relationship for structure output and significantly improves the performance. We show that SCNN outperforms the recurrent neural network (RNN) based ReNet and MRF+CNN (MRFNet) in the lane detection dataset by 8.7% and 4.6% respectively. Moreover, our SCNN won the 1st place on the TuSimple Benchmark Lane Detection Challenge, with an accuracy of 96.53%.
Decoupling Spatio-Temporal Prediction: When Lightweight Large Models Meet Adaptive Hypergraphs
Spatio-temporal prediction is a pivotal task with broad applications in traffic management, climate monitoring, energy scheduling, etc. However, existing methodologies often struggle to balance model expressiveness and computational efficiency, especially when scaling to large real-world datasets. To tackle these challenges, we propose STH-SepNet (Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Separation Networks), a novel framework that decouples temporal and spatial modeling to enhance both efficiency and precision. Therein, the temporal dimension is modeled using lightweight large language models, which effectively capture low-rank temporal dynamics. Concurrently, the spatial dimension is addressed through an adaptive hypergraph neural network, which dynamically constructs hyperedges to model intricate, higher-order interactions. A carefully designed gating mechanism is integrated to seamlessly fuse temporal and spatial representations. By leveraging the fundamental principles of low-rank temporal dynamics and spatial interactions, STH-SepNet offers a pragmatic and scalable solution for spatio-temporal prediction in real-world applications. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STH-SepNet in boosting predictive performance while maintaining computational efficiency. This work may provide a promising lightweight framework for spatio-temporal prediction, aiming to reduce computational demands and while enhancing predictive performance. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/SEU-WENJIA/ST-SepNet-Lightweight-LLMs-Meet-Adaptive-Hypergraphs.
V2X-Real: a Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception
Recent advancements in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies have enabled autonomous vehicles to share sensing information to see through occlusions, greatly boosting the perception capability. However, there are no real-world datasets to facilitate the real V2X cooperative perception research -- existing datasets either only support Vehicle-to-Infrastructure cooperation or Vehicle-to-Vehicle cooperation. In this paper, we present V2X-Real, a large-scale dataset that includes a mixture of multiple vehicles and smart infrastructure to facilitate the V2X cooperative perception development with multi-modality sensing data. Our V2X-Real is collected using two connected automated vehicles and two smart infrastructure, which are all equipped with multi-modal sensors including LiDAR sensors and multi-view cameras. The whole dataset contains 33K LiDAR frames and 171K camera data with over 1.2M annotated bounding boxes of 10 categories in very challenging urban scenarios. According to the collaboration mode and ego perspective, we derive four types of datasets for Vehicle-Centric, Infrastructure-Centric, Vehicle-to-Vehicle, and Infrastructure-to-Infrastructure cooperative perception. Comprehensive multi-class multi-agent benchmarks of SOTA cooperative perception methods are provided. The V2X-Real dataset and codebase are available at https://mobility-lab.seas.ucla.edu/v2x-real.
