Symbolic regression via MDLformer-guided search: from minimizing prediction error to minimizing description length

Symbolic regression, a task discovering the formula best fitting the given data, is typically based on the heuristical search. These methods usually update candidate formulas to obtain new ones with lower prediction errors iteratively. However, since formulas with similar function shapes may have completely different symbolic forms, the prediction error does not decrease monotonously as the search approaches the target formula, causing the low recovery rate of existing methods. To solve this problem, we propose a novel search objective based on the minimum description length, which reflects the distance from the target and decreases monotonically as the search approaches the correct form of the target formula. To estimate the minimum description length of any input data, we design a neural network, MDLformer, which enables robust and scalable estimation through large-scale training. With the MDLformer's output as the search objective, we implement a symbolic regression method, SR4MDL, that can effectively recover the correct mathematical form of the formula. Extensive experiments illustrate its excellent performance in recovering formulas from data. Our method successfully recovers around 50 formulas across two benchmark datasets comprising 133 problems, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 43.92%.

Large-scale Urban Facility Location Selection with Knowledge-informed Reinforcement Learning

The facility location problem (FLP) is a classical combinatorial optimization challenge aimed at strategically laying out facilities to maximize their accessibility. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning method tailored to solve large-scale urban FLP, capable of producing near-optimal solutions at superfast inference speed. We distill the essential swap operation from local search, and simulate it by intelligently selecting edges on a graph of urban regions, guided by a knowledge-informed graph neural network, thus sidestepping the need for heavy computation of local search. Extensive experiments on four US cities with different geospatial conditions demonstrate that our approach can achieve comparable performance to commercial solvers with less than 5\% accessibility loss, while displaying up to 1000 times speedup. We deploy our model as an online geospatial application at https://huggingface.co/spaces/randommmm/MFLP.

TDNetGen: Empowering Complex Network Resilience Prediction with Generative Augmentation of Topology and Dynamics

Predicting the resilience of complex networks, which represents the ability to retain fundamental functionality amidst external perturbations or internal failures, plays a critical role in understanding and improving real-world complex systems. Traditional theoretical approaches grounded in nonlinear dynamical systems rely on prior knowledge of network dynamics. On the other hand, data-driven approaches frequently encounter the challenge of insufficient labeled data, a predicament commonly observed in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel resilience prediction framework for complex networks, designed to tackle this issue through generative data augmentation of network topology and dynamics. The core idea is the strategic utilization of the inherent joint distribution present in unlabeled network data, facilitating the learning process of the resilience predictor by illuminating the relationship between network topology and dynamics. Experiment results on three network datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework TDNetGen can achieve high prediction accuracy up to 85%-95%. Furthermore, the framework still demonstrates a pronounced augmentation capability in extreme low-data regimes, thereby underscoring its utility and robustness in enhancing the prediction of network resilience. We have open-sourced our code in the following link, https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/TDNetGen.

A Population-to-individual Tuning Framework for Adapting Pretrained LM to On-device User Intent Prediction

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, can support rich functions and have developed into indispensable tools in daily life. With the rise of generative AI services, smartphones can potentially transform into personalized assistants, anticipating user needs and scheduling services accordingly. Predicting user intents on smartphones, and reflecting anticipated activities based on past interactions and context, remains a pivotal step towards this vision. Existing research predominantly focuses on specific domains, neglecting the challenge of modeling diverse event sequences across dynamic contexts. Leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) offers a promising avenue, yet adapting PLMs to on-device user intent prediction presents significant challenges. To address these challenges, we propose PITuning, a Population-to-Individual Tuning framework. PITuning enhances common pattern extraction through dynamic event-to-intent transition modeling and addresses long-tailed preferences via adaptive unlearning strategies. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate PITuning's superior intent prediction performance, highlighting its ability to capture long-tailed preferences and its practicality for on-device prediction scenarios.

UrbanWorld: An Urban World Model for 3D City Generation

Cities, as the most fundamental environment of human life, encompass diverse physical elements such as buildings, roads and vegetation with complex interconnection. Crafting realistic, interactive 3D urban environments plays a crucial role in constructing AI agents capable of perceiving, decision-making, and acting like humans in real-world environments. However, creating high-fidelity 3D urban environments usually entails extensive manual labor from designers, involving intricate detailing and accurate representation of complex urban features. Therefore, how to accomplish this in an automatical way remains a longstanding challenge. Toward this problem, we propose UrbanWorld, the first generative urban world model that can automatically create a customized, realistic and interactive 3D urban world with flexible control conditions. UrbanWorld incorporates four key stages in the automatical crafting pipeline: 3D layout generation from openly accessible OSM data, urban scene planning and designing with a powerful urban multimodal large language model (Urban MLLM), controllable urban asset rendering with advanced 3D diffusion techniques, and finally the MLLM-assisted scene refinement. The crafted high-fidelity 3D urban environments enable realistic feedback and interactions for general AI and machine perceptual systems in simulations. We are working on contributing UrbanWorld as an open-source and versatile platform for evaluating and improving AI abilities in perception, decision-making, and interaction in realistic urban environments.

Artificial Intelligence for Complex Network: Potential, Methodology and Application

Complex networks pervade various real-world systems, from the natural environment to human societies. The essence of these networks is in their ability to transition and evolve from microscopic disorder-where network topology and node dynamics intertwine-to a macroscopic order characterized by certain collective behaviors. Over the past two decades, complex network science has significantly enhanced our understanding of the statistical mechanics, structures, and dynamics underlying real-world networks. Despite these advancements, there remain considerable challenges in exploring more realistic systems and enhancing practical applications. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, coupled with the abundance of diverse real-world network data, has heralded a new era in complex network science research. This survey aims to systematically address the potential advantages of AI in overcoming the lingering challenges of complex network research. It endeavors to summarize the pivotal research problems and provide an exhaustive review of the corresponding methodologies and applications. Through this comprehensive survey-the first of its kind on AI for complex networks-we expect to provide valuable insights that will drive further research and advancement in this interdisciplinary field.

A Generative Pre-Training Framework for Spatio-Temporal Graph Transfer Learning

Spatio-temporal graph (STG) learning is foundational for smart city applications, yet it is often hindered by data scarcity in many cities and regions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel generative pre-training framework, GPDiff, for STG transfer learning. Unlike conventional approaches that heavily rely on common feature extraction or intricate transfer learning designs, our solution takes a novel approach by performing generative pre-training on a collection of model parameters optimized with data from source cities. We recast STG transfer learning as pre-training a generative hypernetwork, which generates tailored model parameters guided by prompts, allowing for adaptability to diverse data distributions and city-specific characteristics. GPDiff employs a diffusion model with a transformer-based denoising network, which is model-agnostic to integrate with powerful STG models. By addressing challenges arising from data gaps and the complexity of generalizing knowledge across cities, our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on multiple real-world datasets for tasks such as traffic speed prediction and crowd flow prediction. The implementation of our approach is available: https://github.com/PLUTO-SCY/GPDiff.

UniST: A Prompt-Empowered Universal Model for Urban Spatio-Temporal Prediction

Urban spatio-temporal prediction is crucial for informed decision-making, such as transportation management, resource optimization, and urban planning. Although pretrained foundation models for natural languages have experienced remarkable breakthroughs, wherein one general-purpose model can tackle multiple tasks across various domains, urban spatio-temporal modeling lags behind. Existing approaches for urban prediction are usually tailored for specific spatio-temporal scenarios, requiring task-specific model designs and extensive in-domain training data. In this work, we propose a universal model, UniST, for urban spatio-temporal prediction. Drawing inspiration from large language models, UniST achieves success through: (i) flexibility towards diverse spatio-temporal data characteristics, (ii) effective generative pre-training with elaborated masking strategies to capture complex spatio-temporal relationships, (iii) spatio-temporal knowledge-guided prompts that align and leverage intrinsic and shared knowledge across scenarios. These designs together unlock the potential of a one-for-all model for spatio-temporal prediction with powerful generalization capability. Extensive experiments on 15 cities and 6 domains demonstrate the universality of UniST in advancing state-of-the-art prediction performance, especially in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

Beyond Imitation: Generating Human Mobility from Context-aware Reasoning with Large Language Models

Human mobility behaviours are closely linked to various important societal problems such as traffic congestion, and epidemic control. However, collecting mobility data can be prohibitively expensive and involves serious privacy issues, posing a pressing need for high-quality generative mobility models. Previous efforts focus on learning the behaviour distribution from training samples, and generate new mobility data by sampling the learned distributions. They cannot effectively capture the coherent intentions that drive mobility behavior, leading to low sample efficiency and semantic-awareness. Inspired by the emergent reasoning ability in LLMs, we propose a radical perspective shift that reformulates mobility generation as a commonsense reasoning problem. In this paper, we design a novel Mobility Generation as Reasoning (MobiGeaR) framework that prompts LLM to recursively generate mobility behaviour. Specifically, we design a context-aware chain-of-thoughts prompting technique to align LLMs with context-aware mobility behaviour by few-shot in-context learning. Besides, MobiGeaR employ a divide-and-coordinate mechanism to exploit the synergistic effect between LLM reasoning and mechanistic gravity model. It leverages the step-by-step LLM reasoning to recursively generate a temporal template of activity intentions, which are then mapped to physical locations with a mechanistic gravity model. Experiments on two real-world datasets show MobiGeaR achieves state-of-the-art performance across all metrics, and substantially reduces the size of training samples at the same time. Besides, MobiGeaR also significantly improves the semantic-awareness of mobility generation by improving the intention accuracy by 62.23% and the generated mobility data is proven effective in boosting the performance of downstream applications. The implementation of our approach is available in the paper.

Social Physics Informed Diffusion Model for Crowd Simulation

Crowd simulation holds crucial applications in various domains, such as urban planning, architectural design, and traffic arrangement. In recent years, physics-informed machine learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in crowd simulation but fail to model the heterogeneity and multi-modality of human movement comprehensively. In this paper, we propose a social physics-informed diffusion model named SPDiff to mitigate the above gap. SPDiff takes both the interactive and historical information of crowds in the current timeframe to reverse the diffusion process, thereby generating the distribution of pedestrian movement in the subsequent timeframe. Inspired by the well-known social physics model, i.e., Social Force, regarding crowd dynamics, we design a crowd interaction module to guide the denoising process and further enhance this module with the equivariant properties of crowd interactions. To mitigate error accumulation in long-term simulations, we propose a multi-frame rollout training algorithm for diffusion modeling. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SPDiff in terms of macroscopic and microscopic evaluation metrics. Code and appendix are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SPDiff.