Automating Traffic Model Enhancement with AI Research Agent

Developing efficient traffic models is essential for optimizing transportation systems, yet current approaches remain time-intensive and susceptible to human errors due to their reliance on manual processes. Traditional workflows involve exhaustive literature reviews, formula optimization, and iterative testing, leading to inefficiencies in research. In response, we introduce the Traffic Research Agent (TR-Agent), an AI-driven system designed to autonomously develop and refine traffic models through an iterative, closed-loop process. Specifically, we divide the research pipeline into four key stages: idea generation, theory formulation, theory evaluation, and iterative optimization; and construct TR-Agent with four corresponding modules: Idea Generator, Code Generator, Evaluator, and Analyzer. Working in synergy, these modules retrieve knowledge from external resources, generate novel ideas, implement and debug models, and finally assess them on the evaluation datasets. Furthermore, the system continuously refines these models based on iterative feedback, enhancing research efficiency and model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that TR-Agent achieves significant performance improvements across multiple traffic models, including the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) for car following, the MOBIL lane-changing model, and the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) traffic flow model. Additionally, TR-Agent provides detailed explanations for its optimizations, allowing researchers to verify and build upon its improvements easily. This flexibility makes the framework a powerful tool for researchers in transportation and beyond. To further support research and collaboration, we have open-sourced both the code and data used in our experiments, facilitating broader access and enabling continued advancements in the field.

Learning Car-Following Behaviors Using Bayesian Matrix Normal Mixture Regression

Learning and understanding car-following (CF) behaviors are crucial for microscopic traffic simulation. Traditional CF models, though simple, often lack generalization capabilities, while many data-driven methods, despite their robustness, operate as "black boxes" with limited interpretability. To bridge this gap, this work introduces a Bayesian Matrix Normal Mixture Regression (MNMR) model that simultaneously captures feature correlations and temporal dynamics inherent in CF behaviors. This approach is distinguished by its separate learning of row and column covariance matrices within the model framework, offering an insightful perspective into the human driver decision-making processes. Through extensive experiments, we assess the model's performance across various historical steps of inputs, predictive steps of outputs, and model complexities. The results consistently demonstrate our model's adeptness in effectively capturing the intricate correlations and temporal dynamics present during CF. A focused case study further illustrates the model's outperforming interpretability of identifying distinct operational conditions through the learned mean and covariance matrices. This not only underlines our model's effectiveness in understanding complex human driving behaviors in CF scenarios but also highlights its potential as a tool for enhancing the interpretability of CF behaviors in traffic simulations and autonomous driving systems.

Covert Communications in STAR-RIS-Aided Rate-Splitting Multiple Access Systems

In this paper, we investigate covert communications in a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-aided rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) system. Under the RSMA principles, the messages for the covert user (Bob) and public user (Grace) are converted to the common and private streams at the legitimate transmitter (Alice) to realize downlink transmissions, while the STAR-RIS is deployed not only to aid the public transmissions from Alice to Grace, but also to shield the covert transmissions from Alice to Bob against the warden (Willie). To characterize the covert performance of the considered STAR-RIS-aided RSMA (STAR-RIS-RSMA) system, we derive analytical expression for the minimum average detection error probability of Willie, based on which a covert rate maximization problem is formulated. To maximize Bob's covert rate while confusing Willie's monitoring, the transmit power allocation, common rate allocation, and STAR-RIS reflection/transmission beamforming are jointly optimized subject to Grace's quality of service (QoS) requirements. The non-convex covert rate maximization problem, consisting of highly coupled system parameters are decoupled into three sub-problems of transmit power allocation, common rate allocation, and STAR-RIS reflection/transmission beamforming, respectively. To obtain the rank-one constrained optimal solution for the sub-problem of optimizing the STAR-RIS reflection/transmission beamforming, a penalty-based successive convex approximation scheme is developed. Moreover, an alternative optimization (AO) algorithm is designed to determine the optimal solution for the sub-problem of optimizing the transmit power allocation, while the original problem is overall solved by a new AO algorithm.

EquiDiff: A Conditional Equivariant Diffusion Model For Trajectory Prediction

Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for the safe and efficient operation of autonomous vehicles. The growing popularity of deep learning has led to the development of numerous methods for trajectory prediction. While deterministic deep learning models have been widely used, deep generative models have gained popularity as they learn data distributions from training data and account for trajectory uncertainties. In this study, we propose EquiDiff, a deep generative model for predicting future vehicle trajectories. EquiDiff is based on the conditional diffusion model, which generates future trajectories by incorporating historical information and random Gaussian noise. The backbone model of EquiDiff is an SO(2)-equivariant transformer that fully utilizes the geometric properties of location coordinates. In addition, we employ Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Attention Networks to extract social interactions from historical trajectories. To evaluate the performance of EquiDiff, we conduct extensive experiments on the NGSIM dataset. Our results demonstrate that EquiDiff outperforms other baseline models in short-term prediction, but has slightly higher errors for long-term prediction. Furthermore, we conduct an ablation study to investigate the contribution of each component of EquiDiff to the prediction accuracy. Additionally, we present a visualization of the generation process of our diffusion model, providing insights into the uncertainty of the prediction.

A multi-functional simulation platform for on-demand ride service operations

On-demand ride services or ride-sourcing services have been experiencing fast development in the past decade. Various mathematical models and optimization algorithms have been developed to help ride-sourcing platforms design operational strategies with higher efficiency. However, due to cost and reliability issues (implementing an immature algorithm for real operations may result in system turbulence), it is commonly infeasible to validate these models and train/test these optimization algorithms within real-world ride sourcing platforms. Acting as a useful test bed, a simulation platform for ride-sourcing systems will be very important to conduct algorithm training/testing or model validation through trails and errors. While previous studies have established a variety of simulators for their own tasks, it lacks a fair and public platform for comparing the models or algorithms proposed by different researchers. In addition, the existing simulators still face many challenges, ranging from their closeness to real environments of ride-sourcing systems, to the completeness of different tasks they can implement. To address the challenges, we propose a novel multi-functional and open-sourced simulation platform for ride-sourcing systems, which can simulate the behaviors and movements of various agents on a real transportation network. It provides a few accessible portals for users to train and test various optimization algorithms, especially reinforcement learning algorithms, for a variety of tasks, including on-demand matching, idle vehicle repositioning, and dynamic pricing. In addition, it can be used to test how well the theoretical models approximate the simulated outcomes. Evaluated on real-world data based experiments, the simulator is demonstrated to be an efficient and effective test bed for various tasks related to on-demand ride service operations.

Cross-City Traffic Prediction via Semantic-Fused Hierarchical Graph Transfer Learning

Accurate traffic prediction benefits urban management and improves transportation efficiency. Recently, data-driven methods have been widely applied in traffic prediction and outperformed traditional methods. However, data-driven methods normally require massive data for training, while data scarcity is ubiquitous in low-developmental or newly constructed regions. To tackle this problem, we can extract meta knowledge from data-rich cities to data-scarce cities via transfer learning. Besides, relations among urban regions can be organized into various semantic graphs, e.g. proximity and POI similarity, which is barely considered in previous studies. In this paper, we propose Semantic-Fused Hierarchical Graph Transfer Learning (SF-HGTL) model to achieve knowledge transfer across cities with fused semantics. In detail, we employ hierarchical graph transformation followed by meta-knowledge retrieval to achieve knowledge transfer in various granularity. In addition, we introduce meta semantic nodes to reduce the number of parameters as well as share information across semantics. Afterwards, the parameters of the base model are generated by fused semantic embeddings to predict traffic status in terms of task heterogeneity. We implement experiments on five real-world datasets and verify the effectiveness of our SF-HGTL model by comparing it with other baselines.

Subtype-Former: a deep learning approach for cancer subtype discovery with multi-omics data

Motivation: Cancer is heterogeneous, affecting the precise approach to personalized treatment. Accurate subtyping can lead to better survival rates for cancer patients. High-throughput technologies provide multiple omics data for cancer subtyping. However, precise cancer subtyping remains challenging due to the large amount and high dimensionality of omics data. Results: This study proposed Subtype-Former, a deep learning method based on MLP and Transformer Block, to extract the low-dimensional representation of the multi-omics data. K-means and Consensus Clustering are also used to achieve accurate subtyping results. We compared Subtype-Former with the other state-of-the-art subtyping methods across the TCGA 10 cancer types. We found that Subtype-Former can perform better on the benchmark datasets of more than 5000 tumors based on the survival analysis. In addition, Subtype-Former also achieved outstanding results in pan-cancer subtyping, which can help analyze the commonalities and differences across various cancer types at the molecular level. Finally, we applied Subtype-Former to the TCGA 10 types of cancers. We identified 50 essential biomarkers, which can be used to study targeted cancer drugs and promote the development of cancer treatments in the era of precision medicine.

CityNet: A Multi-city Multi-modal Dataset for Smart City Applications

Data-driven approaches have been applied to many problems in urban computing. However, in the research community, such approaches are commonly studied under data from limited sources, and are thus unable to characterize the complexity of urban data coming from multiple entities and the correlations among them. Consequently, an inclusive and multifaceted dataset is necessary to facilitate more extensive studies on urban computing. In this paper, we present CityNet, a multi-modal urban dataset containing data from 7 cities, each of which coming from 3 data sources. We first present the generation process of CityNet as well as its basic properties. In addition, to facilitate the use of CityNet, we carry out extensive machine learning experiments, including spatio-temporal predictions, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. The experimental results not only provide benchmarks for a wide range of tasks and methods, but also uncover internal correlations among cities and tasks within CityNet that, with adequate leverage, can improve performances on various tasks. With the benchmarking results and the correlations uncovered, we believe that CityNet can contribute to the field of urban computing by supporting research on many advanced topics.

Joint predictions of multi-modal ride-hailing demands: a deep multi-task multigraph learning-based approach

Ride-hailing platforms generally provide various service options to customers, such as solo ride services, shared ride services, etc. It is generally expected that demands for different service modes are correlated, and the prediction of demand for one service mode can benefit from historical observations of demands for other service modes. Moreover, an accurate joint prediction of demands for multiple service modes can help the platforms better allocate and dispatch vehicle resources. Although there is a large stream of literature on ride-hailing demand predictions for one specific service mode, little efforts have been paid towards joint predictions of ride-hailing demands for multiple service modes. To address this issue, we propose a deep multi-task multi-graph learning approach, which combines two components: (1) multiple multi-graph convolutional (MGC) networks for predicting demands for different service modes, and (2) multi-task learning modules that enable knowledge sharing across multiple MGC networks. More specifically, two multi-task learning structures are established. The first one is the regularized cross-task learning, which builds cross-task connections among the inputs and outputs of multiple MGC networks. The second one is the multi-linear relationship learning, which imposes a prior tensor normal distribution on the weights of various MGC networks. Although there are no concrete bridges between different MGC networks, the weights of these networks are constrained by each other and subject to a common prior distribution. Evaluated with the for-hire-vehicle datasets in Manhattan, we show that our propose approach outperforms the benchmark algorithms in prediction accuracy for different ride-hailing modes.

Predicting origin-destination ride-sourcing demand with a spatio-temporal encoder-decoder residual multi-graph convolutional network

With the rapid development of mobile-internet technologies, on-demand ride-sourcing services have become increasingly popular and largely reshaped the way people travel. Demand prediction is one of the most fundamental components in supply-demand management systems of ride-sourcing platforms. With accurate short-term prediction for origin-destination (OD) demand, the platforms make precise and timely decisions on real-time matching, idle vehicle reallocations and ride-sharing vehicle routing, etc. Compared to zone-based demand prediction that has been examined by many previous studies, OD-based demand prediction is more challenging. This is mainly due to the complicated spatial and temporal dependencies among demand of different OD pairs. To overcome this challenge, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Encoder-Decoder Residual Multi-Graph Convolutional network (ST-ED-RMGC), a novel deep learning model for predicting ride-sourcing demand of various OD pairs. Firstly, the model constructs OD graphs, which utilize adjacent matrices to characterize the non-Euclidean pair-wise geographical and semantic correlations among different OD pairs. Secondly, based on the constructed graphs, a residual multi-graph convolutional (RMGC) network is designed to encode the contextual-aware spatial dependencies, and a long-short term memory (LSTM) network is used to encode the temporal dependencies, into a dense vector space. Finally, we reuse the RMGC networks to decode the compressed vector back to OD graphs and predict the future OD demand. Through extensive experiments on the for-hire-vehicles datasets in Manhattan, New York City, we show that our proposed deep learning framework outperforms the state-of-arts by a significant margin.