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Youfang Lin

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38 papers
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38

TIST Journal 2026 Journal Article

DRL4AOI: A DRL Framework for Semantic-aware AOI Segmentation in Location-based Services

  • Youfang Lin
  • Jinji Fu
  • Haomin Wen
  • Jiyuan Wang
  • Zhenjie Wei
  • Yuting Qiang
  • Xiaowei Mao
  • Lixia Wu

In Location-Based Services (LBS), such as food delivery, a fundamental task is segmenting Areas of Interest (AOIs), aiming at partitioning the urban geographical spaces into non-overlapping regions. Traditional AOI segmentation algorithms primarily rely on road networks to partition urban areas. While promising in modeling the geo-semantics, road network-based models overlooked the service-semantic goals (e.g., workload equality) in LBS service. In this article, we point out that the AOI segmentation problem can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which gradually chooses a nearby AOI for each grid in the current AOI’s border. Based on the MDP, we present the first attempt to generalize Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for AOI segmentation, leading to a novel DRL-based framework called DRL4AOI. The DRL4AOI framework introduces different service-semantic goals in a flexible way by treating them as rewards that guide the AOI generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of DRL4AOI, we develop and release an AOI segmentation system. We also present a representative implementation of DRL4AOI—TrajRL4AOI—for AOI segmentation in the logistics service. It introduces a Double Deep Q-learning Network (DDQN) to gradually optimize the AOI generation for two specific semantic goals: (i) trajectory modularity, i.e., maximize tightness of the trajectory connections within an AOI and the sparsity of connections between AOIs, (ii) matchness with the road network, i.e., maximizing the matchness between AOIs and the road network. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. The code and system is publicly available at https://github.com/Kogler7/AoiOpt.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Think How Your Teammates Think: Active Inference Can Benefit Decentralized Execution

  • Hao Wu
  • Shoucheng Song
  • Chang Yao
  • Sheng Han
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Youfang Lin
  • Kai Lv

In multi-agent systems, explicit cognition of teammates' decision logic serves as a critical factor in facilitating coordination. Communication (i.e., "Tell") can assist in the cognitive development process by information dissemination, yet it is inevitably subject to real-world constraints such as noise, latency, and attacks. Therefore, building the understanding of teammates' decisions without communication remains challenging. To address this, we propose a novel non-communication MARL framework that realizes the construction of cognition through local observation-based modeling (i.e., "Think"). Our framework enables agents to model teammates' active inference process. At first, the proposed method produces three teammate portraits: perception-belief-action. Specifically, we model the teammate's decision process as follows: 1) Perception: observing environments; 2) Belief: forming beliefs; 3) Action: making decisions. Then, we selectively integrate the belief portrait into the decision process based on the accuracy and relevance of the perception portrait. This enables the selection of cooperative teammates and facilitates effective collaboration. Extensive experiments on the SMAC, SMACv2, MPE, and GRF benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Balancing Imbalance: Data-Scarce Urban Flow Prediction via Spatio-Temporal Balanced Transfer Learning

  • Xinyan Hao
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Youfang Lin

Advanced deep spatio-temporal networks have become the mainstream for traffic prediction, but the widespread adoption of these models is impeded by the prevalent scarcity of available data. Despite cross-city transfer learning emerging as a common strategy to address this issue, it overlooks the inherent distribution imbalances within each city, which could potentially hinder the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Balanced Transfer Learning (STBaT) framework to enhance existing spatio-temporal prediction networks, ensuring both universality and precision in predictions for new urban environments. A Regional Imbalance Acquisition Module is designed to model the regional imbalances of source cities. Besides, to promote generalizable knowledge acquisition, a Spatio-Temporal Balanced Learning Module is devised to balance the predictive learning process. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed approach compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CoDe: Communication Delay-Tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration via Dual Alignment of Intent and Timeliness

  • Shoucheng Song
  • Youfang Lin
  • Sheng Han
  • Chang Yao
  • Hao Wu
  • Shuo Wang
  • Kai Lv

Communication has been widely employed to enhance multi-agent collaboration. Previous research has typically assumed delay-free communication, a strong assumption that is challenging to meet in practice. However, real-world agents suffer from channel delays, receiving messages sent at different time points, termed Asynchronous Communication, leading to cognitive biases and breakdowns in collaboration. This paper first defines two communication delay settings in MARL and emphasizes their harm to collaboration. To handle the above delays, this paper proposes a novel framework, Communication Delay-Tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration (CoDe). At first, CoDe learns an intent representation as messages through future action inference, reflecting the stable future behavioral trends of the agents. Then, CoDe devises a dual alignment mechanism of intent and timeliness to strengthen the fusion process of asynchronous messages. In this way, agents can extract the long-term intent of others, even from delayed messages, and selectively utilize the most recent messages that are relevant to their intent. Experimental results demonstrate that CoDe outperforms baseline algorithms in three MARL benchmarks without delay and exhibits robustness under fixed and time-varying delays.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CognTKE: A Cognitive Temporal Knowledge Extrapolation Framework

  • Wei Chen
  • Yuting Wu
  • Shuhan Wu
  • Zhiyu Zhang
  • Mengqi Liao
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan

Reasoning future unknowable facts on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a challenging task, holding significant academic and practical values for various fields. Existing studies exploring explainable reasoning concentrate on modeling comprehensible temporal paths relevant to the query. Yet, these path-based methods primarily focus on local temporal paths appearing in recent times, failing to capture the complex temporal paths in TKG and resulting in the loss of longer historical relations related to the query. Motivated by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science, we propose a Cognitive Temporal Knowledge Extrapolation framework (CognTKE), which introduces a novel temporal cognitive relation directed graph (TCR-Digraph) and performs interpretable global shallow reasoning and local deep reasoning over the TCR-Digraph. Specifically, the proposed TCR-Digraph is constituted by retrieving significant local and global historical temporal relation paths associated with the query. In addition, CognTKE presents the global shallow reasoner and the local deep reasoner to perform global one-hop temporal relation reasoning (System 1) and local complex multi-hop path reasoning (System 2) over the TCR-Digraph, respectively. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CognTKE achieves significant improvement in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines and delivers excellent zero-shot reasoning ability.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DutyTTE: Deciphering Uncertainty in Origin-Destination Travel Time Estimation

  • Xiaowei Mao
  • Yan Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Yubin Chen
  • Xingyu Xian
  • Haomin Wen
  • Qisen Xu
  • Youfang Lin

Uncertainty quantification in travel time estimation (TTE) aims to estimate the confidence interval for travel time, given the origin (O), destination (D), and departure time (T). Accurately quantifying this uncertainty requires generating the most likely path and assessing travel time uncertainty along the path. This involves two main challenges: 1) Predicting a path that aligns with the ground truth, and 2) modeling the impact of travel time in each segment on overall uncertainty under varying conditions. We propose DutyTTE to address these challenges. For the first challenge, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning method to improve alignment between the predicted path and the ground truth, providing more accurate travel time information from road segments to improve TTE. For the second challenge, we propose a mixture of experts guided uncertainty quantification mechanism to better capture travel time uncertainty for each segment under varying contexts. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

AAMAS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Enhancing Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning with Trajectory-Constrained Diffusion Planning

  • Hengrui Zhang
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shuo Shen
  • Hanfeng Lin
  • Peng Cheng
  • Sheng Han
  • Kai Lv

Recent approaches have utilized the RL via Supervised Learning (RvS) framework to model offline safe RL. However, these methods overlook the fundamental differences between reward maximization and constraint satisfaction, treating them identically with guidance sampling, and requiring different hyperparameters for different constraint conditions. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework, the Trajectory-Constrained Diffusion Planner (TCDP), which reframes offline safe RL as a product of trajectory conditional probabilities and energy functions. Additionally, we introduce Cost-returns-To-Go relabeling with Data Augmentation (CTGDA) and the Quantile Normalization (QN) technique, enabling the adaptation to various constraints without retraining or extensive hyperparameter adjustments.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

From General Relation Patterns to Task-Specific Decision-Making in Continual Multi-Agent Coordination

  • Chang Yao
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shoucheng Song
  • Hao Wu
  • Yuqing Ma
  • Sheng Han
  • Kai Lv

Continual Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Co-MARL) requires agents to address catastrophic forgetting issues while learning new coordination policies with the dynamics team. In this paper, we delve into the core of Co-MARL, namely Relation Patterns, which refer to agents’ general understanding of interactions. In addition to generality, relation patterns exhibit task-specificity when mapped to different action spaces. To this end, we propose a novel method called General Relation Patterns-Guided Task-specific Decision-Maker (RPG). In RPG, agents extract relation patterns from dynamic observation spaces using a relation capturer. These task-agnostic relation patterns are then mapped to different action spaces via a task-specific decision-maker generated by a conditional hypernetwork. To combat forgetting, we further introduce regularization items on both the relation capturer and the conditional hypernetwork. Results on SMAC and LBF demonstrate that RPG effectively prevents catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks and achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

From Indicators to Insights: Diversity-Optimized for Medical Series-Text Decoding via LLMs

  • Xiyuan Jin
  • Jing Wang
  • Ziwei Lin
  • QIANRU JIA
  • Yuqing Huang
  • Xiaojun Ning
  • Zhonghua Shi
  • Youfang Lin

Medical time-series analysis differs fundamentally from general ones by requiring specialized domain knowledge to interpret complex signals and clinical context. Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for augmenting medical time-series analysis by complementing raw series with rich contextual knowledge drawn from biomedical literature and clinical guidelines. However, realizing this potential depends on precise and meaningful prompts that guide the LLM to key information. Yet, determining what constitutes effective prompt content remains non-trivial—especially in medical settings where signal interpretation often hinges on subtle, expert-defined decision-making indicators. To this end, we propose InDiGO, a knowledge-aware evolutionary learning framework that integrates clinical signals and decision-making indicators through iterative optimization. Across four medical benchmarks, InDiGO consistently outperforms prior methods. The code is available at: https: //github. com/jinxyBJTU/InDiGO.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Infer the Whole from a Glimpse of a Part: Keypoint-Based Knowledge Graph for Vehicle Re-Identification

  • Kai Lv
  • Yunlong Li
  • Zhuo Chen
  • Shuo Wang
  • Sheng Han
  • Youfang Lin

Vehicle re-identification aims to match vehicles across non-overlapping camera views. Many existing methods extract features from one specific image, and these methods lack view-invariance when comparing vehicles of different orientations. As a result, discriminative parts obscured by viewpoint changes cannot contribute effectively to matching. This work presents a novel keypoint-based framework for vehicle Re-ID. We propose to explicitly model the intrinsic structural relationships between vehicle components via knowledge graph. By establishing connection between keypoints, our approach aims to leverage such prior to match vehicles even when some parts are not directly comparable due to orientation inconsistencies. Specifically, given query and gallery images, we first detect visible keypoints. Then, a transformer-based model infers features for non-overlapped keypoints by conditioning on visible correspondences defined in the knowledge graph. The final representation integrates visible and inferred features. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-arts on standard benchmarks under cross-view matching scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first work introducing structural priors via keypoint knowledge graphs for view-invariant vehicle re-identification.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Optimal Information Retention for Time-Series Explanations

  • Jinghang Yue
  • Jing Wang 0060
  • Lu Zhang
  • Shuo Zhang 0015
  • Da Li
  • Zhaoyang Ma
  • Youfang Lin

Explaining deep models for time-series data is crucial for identifying key patterns in sensitive domains, such as healthcare and finance. However, due to the lack of unified optimization criterion, existing explanation methods often suffer from redundancy and incompleteness, where irrelevant patterns are included or key patterns are missed in explanations. To address this challenge, we propose the Optimal Information Retention Principle, where conditional mutual information defines minimizing redundancy and maximizing completeness as optimization objectives. We then derive the corresponding objective function theoretically. As a practical framework, we introduce an explanation framework ORTE, learning a binary mask to eliminate redundant information while mining temporal patterns of explanations. We decouple the discrete mapping process to ensure the stability of gradient propagation, while employing contrastive learning to achieve precise filtering of explanatory patterns through the mask, thereby realizing a trade-off between low redundancy and high completeness. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed principle significantly improves the accuracy and completeness of explanations compared to baseline methods. The code is available at https: //github. com/moon2yue/ORTE_public.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

PLMTrajRec: A Scalable and Generalizable Trajectory Recovery Method with Pre-trained Language Models

  • Tonglong Wei
  • Yan Lin
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Jilin Hu
  • Haitao Yuan
  • Gao Cong
  • Huaiyu Wan

Spatiotemporal trajectory data is crucial for various traffic-related applications. However, issues such as device malfunctions and network instability often result in sparse trajectories that lose detailed movement information compared to their dense counterparts. Recovering missing points in sparse trajectories is thus essential. Despite recent progress, three challenges remain. First, the lack of large-scale dense trajectory datasets hinders the training of a trajectory recovery model. Second, the varying spatiotemporal correlations in sparse trajectories make it hard to generalize across different sampling intervals. Third, extracting road conditions for missing points is non-trivial. To address these challenges, we propose $\textit{PLMTrajRec}$, a novel trajectory recovery model. It leverages the scalability of a pre-trained language model (PLM) and can effectively recover trajectories by fine-tuning with small-scale dense trajectory datasets. To handle different sampling intervals in sparse trajectories, we first convert sampling intervals and movement features into prompts for the PLM to understand. We then introduce a trajectory encoder to unify trajectories of varying intervals into a single interval. To extract road conditions for missing points, we propose an area flow-guided implicit trajectory prompt that represents traffic conditions in each region, and a road condition passing mechanism that infers the road conditions of missing points using the observed ones. Experiments on four public trajectory datasets with three sampling intervals demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and generalization ability of PLMTrajRec. Code is available at https: //github. com/wtl52656/PLMTrajRec.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

REFED: A Subject Real-time Dynamic Labeled EEG-fNIRS Synchronized Recorded Emotion Dataset

  • Xiaojun Ning
  • Jing Wang
  • Zhiyang Feng
  • Tianzuo Xin
  • Shuo Zhang
  • Shaoqi Zhang
  • Zheng Lian
  • Yi Ding

Affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) play a crucial role in personalized human–computer interaction and neurofeedback modulation. To develop practical and effective aBCI paradigms and to investigate the spatial-temporal dynamics of brain activity under emotional inducement, portable electroencephalography (EEG) signals have been widely adopted. To further enhance spatial-temporal perception, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has attracted increasing interest in the aBCI field and has been explored in combination with EEG. However, existing datasets typically provide only static fixation labels, overlooking the dynamic changes in subjects' emotions. Notably, some studies have attempted to collect continuously annotated emotional data, but they have recorded only peripheral physiological signals without directly observing brain activity, limiting insight into underlying neural states under different emotions. To address these challenges, we present the Real-time labeled EEG-fNIRS Dataset (REFED). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first EEG-fNIRS dataset with real-time dynamic emotional annotations. REFED simultaneously records brain signals from both EEG and fNIRS modalities while providing continuous, real-time annotations of valence and arousal. The results of the data analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of emotion inducement and the reliability of real-time annotation. This dataset offers the possibility for studying the neurovascular coupling mechanism under emotional evolution and for developing dynamic, robust affective BCIs.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

STD-PLM: Understanding Both Spatial and Temporal Properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM

  • Yiheng Huang
  • Xiaowei Mao
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Yubin Chen
  • Junfeng Shen
  • Tiankuo Li
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan

Spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation are important for real-world intelligent systems. Most existing methods are tailored for individual forecasting or imputation tasks but are not designed for both. Additionally, they are less effective for zero-shot and few-shot learning. While pre-trained language model (PLM) have exhibited strong pattern recognition and reasoning abilities across various tasks, including few-shot and zero-shot learning, their applications in spatial-temporal data understanding has been constrained by insufficient modeling of complex correlations such as the temporal correlations, spatial connectivity, non-pairwise and high-order spatial-temporal correlations within data. In this paper, we propose STD-PLM for understanding both spatial and temporal properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM, which is capable of implementing both spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation tasks. STD-PLM understands spatial-temporal correlations via explicitly designed spatial and temporal tokenizers. Topology-aware node embeddings are designed for PLM to comprehend and exploit the topology structure of data in inductive manner. Furthermore, to mitigate the efficiency issues introduced by the PLM, we design a sandglass attention module(SGA) combined with a specific constrained loss function, which significantly improves the model's efficiency while ensuring performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STD-PLM exhibits competitive performance and generalization capabilities across the forecasting and imputation tasks on various datasets. Moreover, STD-PLM achieves promising results on both few-shot and zero-shot tasks.

JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Subject-Adaptation Salient Wave Detection Network for Multimodal Sleep Stage Classification

  • Jing Wang
  • Xuehui Wang
  • Xiaojun Ning
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huy Phan
  • Ziyu Jia

Sleep stage classification is an important step in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Despite the high classification performance of previous sleep stage classification work, some challenges remain unresolved: 1) How to effectively capture salient waves in sleep signals to improve sleep stage classification results. 2) How to capture salient waves affected by inter-subject variability. 3) How to adaptively regulate the importance of different modals for different sleep stages. To address these challenges, we propose SleepWaveNet, a multimodal salient wave detection network, which is motivated by the salient object detection task in computer vision. It has a U-Transformer structure to detect salient waves in sleep signals. Meanwhile, the subject-adaptation wave extraction architecture based on transfer learning can adapt to the information of target individuals and extract salient waves with inter-subject variability. In addition, the multimodal attention module can adaptively enhance the importance of specific modal data for sleep stage classification tasks. Experiments on three datasets show that SleepWaveNet has better overall performance than existing baselines. Moreover, visualization experiments show that the model has the ability to capture salient waves with inter-subject variability.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

TrajCogn: Leveraging LLMs for Cognizing Movement Patterns and Travel Purposes from Trajectories

  • Zeyu Zhou
  • Yan Lin
  • Haomin Wen
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Jilin Hu
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan

Spatio-temporal trajectories are crucial for data mining tasks, requiring versatile learning methods that can accurately extract movement patterns and travel purposes. While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility through training on extensive datasets, and trajectories share similarities with natural language, standard LLMs cannot directly handle spatio-temporal features or extract trajectory-specific information. We propose TrajCogn, a model that effectively adapts LLMs for trajectory learning. TrajCogn incorporates a novel trajectory semantic embedder to process spatio-temporal features and extract movement patterns and travel purposes, along with a trajectory prompt that integrates this information into LLMs for various downstream tasks. Experiments on three real-world datasets and four representative tasks demonstrate TrajCogn's effectiveness.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

TrajMamba: An Efficient and Semantic-rich Vehicle Trajectory Pre-training Model

  • Yichen Liu
  • Yan Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Zeyu Zhou
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan

Vehicle GPS trajectories record how vehicles move over time, storing valuable travel semantics, including movement patterns and travel purposes. Learning travel semantics effectively and efficiently is crucial for real-world applications of trajectory data, which is hindered by two major challenges. First, travel purposes are tied to the functions of the roads and points-of-interest (POIs) involved in a trip. Such information is encoded in textual addresses and descriptions and introduces heavy computational burden to modeling. Second, real-world trajectories often contain redundant points, which harm both computational efficiency and trajectory embedding quality. To address these challenges, we propose TrajMamba, a novel approach for efficient and semantically rich vehicle trajectory learning. TrajMamba introduces a Traj-Mamba Encoder that captures movement patterns by jointly modeling both GPS and road perspectives of trajectories, enabling robust representations of continuous travel behaviors. It also incorporates a Travel Purpose-aware Pre-training procedure to integrate travel purposes into the learned embeddings without introducing extra overhead to embedding calculation. To reduce redundancy in trajectories, TrajMamba features a Knowledge Distillation Pre-training scheme to identify key trajectory points through a learnable mask generator and obtain effective compressed trajectory embeddings. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and three downstream tasks show that TrajMamba outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both efficiency and accuracy.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

TransferTraj: A Vehicle Trajectory Learning Model for Region and Task Transferability

  • Tonglong Wei
  • Yan Lin
  • Zeyu Zhou
  • Haomin Wen
  • Jilin Hu
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Youfang Lin
  • Gao Cong

Vehicle GPS trajectories provide valuable movement information that supports various downstream tasks and applications. A desirable trajectory learning model should be able to transfer across regions and tasks without retraining, avoiding the need to maintain multiple specialized models and subpar performance with limited training data. However, each region has its unique spatial features and contexts, which are reflected in vehicle movement patterns and are difficult to generalize. Additionally, transferring across different tasks faces technical challenges due to the varying input-output structures required for each task. Existing efforts towards transferability primarily involve learning embedding vectors for trajectories, which perform poorly in region transfer and require retraining of prediction modules for task transfer. To address these challenges, we propose $\textit{TransferTraj}$, a vehicle GPS trajectory learning model that excels in both region and task transferability. For region transferability, we introduce RTTE as the main learnable module within TransferTraj. It integrates spatial, temporal, POI, and road network modalities of trajectories to effectively manage variations in spatial context distribution across regions. It also introduces a TRIE module for incorporating relative information of spatial features and a spatial context MoE module for handling movement patterns in diverse contexts. For task transferability, we propose a task-transferable input-output scheme that unifies the input-output structure of different tasks into the masking and recovery of modalities and trajectory points. This approach allows TransferTraj to be pre-trained once and transferred to different tasks without retraining. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world vehicle trajectory datasets under various transfer settings, including task transfer, zero-shot region transfer, and few-shot region transfer. Experimental results demonstrate that TransferTraj significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in different scenarios, validating its effectiveness in region and task transfer. Code is available at https: //github. com/wtl52656/TransferTraj.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DiffLight: A Partial Rewards Conditioned Diffusion Model for Traffic Signal Control with Missing Data

  • Hanyang Chen
  • Yang Jiang
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Xiaowei Mao
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan

The application of reinforcement learning in traffic signal control (TSC) has been extensively researched and yielded notable achievements. However, most existing works for TSC assume that traffic data from all surrounding intersections is fully and continuously available through sensors. In real-world applications, this assumption often fails due to sensor malfunctions or data loss, making TSC with missing data a critical challenge. To meet the needs of practical applications, we introduce DiffLight, a novel conditional diffusion model for TSC under data-missing scenarios in the offline setting. Specifically, we integrate two essential sub-tasks, i. e. , traffic data imputation and decision-making, by leveraging a Partial Rewards Conditioned Diffusion (PRCD) model to prevent missing rewards from interfering with the learning process. Meanwhile, to effectively capture the spatial-temporal dependencies among intersections, we design a Spatial-Temporal transFormer (STFormer) architecture. In addition, we propose a Diffusion Communication Mechanism (DCM) to promote better communication and control performance under data-missing scenarios. Extensive experiments on five datasets with various data-missing scenarios demonstrate that DiffLight is an effective controller to address TSC with missing data. The code of DiffLight is released at https: //github. com/lokol5579/DiffLight-release.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Enhancing Off-Policy Constrained Reinforcement Learning through Adaptive Ensemble C Estimation

  • Hengrui Zhang
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shuo Shen
  • Sheng Han
  • Kai Lv

In the domain of real-world agents, the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains challenging due to the necessity for safety constraints. Previously, Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) has predominantly focused on on-policy algorithms. Although these algorithms exhibit a degree of efficacy, their interactivity efficiency in real-world settings is sub-optimal, highlighting the demand for more efficient off-policy methods. However, off-policy CRL algorithms grapple with challenges in precise estimation of the C-function, particularly due to the fluctuations in the constrained Lagrange multiplier. Addressing this gap, our study focuses on the nuances of C-value estimation in off-policy CRL and introduces the Adaptive Ensemble C-learning (AEC) approach to reduce these inaccuracies. Building on state-of-the-art off-policy algorithms, we propose AEC-based CRL algorithms designed for enhanced task optimization. Extensive experiments on nine constrained robotics tasks reveal the superior interaction efficiency and performance of our algorithms in comparison to preceding methods.

IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

How to Learn Domain-Invariant Representations for Visual Reinforcement Learning: An Information-Theoretical Perspective

  • Shuo Wang
  • Zhihao Wu
  • Jinwen Wang
  • Xiaobo Hu
  • Youfang Lin
  • Kai Lv

Despite the impressive success in visual control challenges, Visual Reinforcement Learning (VRL) policies have struggled to generalize to other scenarios. Existing works attempt to empirically improve the generalization capability, lacking theoretical support. In this work, we explore how to learn domain-invariant representations for VRL from an information-theoretical perspective. Specifically, we identify three Mutual Information (MI) terms. These terms highlight that a robust representation should preserve domain invariant information (return and dynamic transition) under significant observation perturbation. Furthermore, we relax the MI terms to derive three components for implementing a practical Mutual Information-based Invariant Representation (MIIR) algorithm for VRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIIR achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance and the best sample efficiency in the DeepMind Control suite, Robotic Manipulation, and Carla.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Mobility-LLM: Learning Visiting Intentions and Travel Preference from Human Mobility Data with Large Language Models

  • Letian Gong
  • Yan Lin
  • Xinyue Zhang
  • Yiwen Lu
  • Xuedi Han
  • Yichen Liu
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Youfang Lin

Location-based services (LBS) have accumulated extensive human mobility data on diverse behaviors through check-in sequences. These sequences offer valuable insights into users’ intentions and preferences. Yet, existing models analyzing check-in sequences fail to consider the semantics contained in these sequences, which closely reflect human visiting intentions and travel preferences, leading to an incomplete comprehension. Drawing inspiration from the exceptional semantic understanding and contextual information processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across various domains, we present Mobility-LLM, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to analyze check-in sequences for multiple tasks. Since LLMs cannot directly interpret check-ins, we reprogram these sequences to help LLMs comprehensively understand the semantics of human visiting intentions and travel preferences. Specifically, we introduce a visiting intention memory network (VIMN) to capture the visiting intentions at each record, along with a shared pool of human travel preference prompts (HTPP) to guide the LLM in understanding users’ travel preferences. These components enhance the model’s ability to extract and leverage semantic information from human mobility data effectively. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and three downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing models, underscoring the effectiveness of Mobility-LLM in advancing our understanding of human mobility data within LBS contexts.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

PGN: The RNN's New Successor is Effective for Long-Range Time Series Forecasting

  • Yuxin Jia
  • Youfang Lin
  • Jing Yu
  • Shuo Wang
  • Tianhao Liu
  • Huaiyu Wan

Due to the recurrent structure of RNN, the long information propagation path poses limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, gradient explosion/vanishing issues, and inefficient sequential execution. Based on this, we propose a novel paradigm called Parallel Gated Network (PGN) as the new successor to RNN. PGN directly captures information from previous time steps through the designed Historical Information Extraction (HIE) layer and leverages gated mechanisms to select and fuse it with the current time step information. This reduces the information propagation path to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, effectively addressing the limitations of RNN. To enhance PGN's performance in long-range time series forecasting tasks, we propose a novel temporal modeling framework called Temporal PGN (TPGN). TPGN incorporates two branches to comprehensively capture the semantic information of time series. One branch utilizes PGN to capture long-term periodic patterns while preserving their local characteristics. The other branch employs patches to capture short-term information and aggregate the global representation of the series. TPGN achieves a theoretical complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{L})$, ensuring efficiency in its operations. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and high efficiency of TPGN, further confirming the effectiveness of PGN as the new successor to RNN in long-range time series forecasting. The code is available in this repository: https: //github. com/Water2sea/TPGN.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

What Effects the Generalization in Visual Reinforcement Learning: Policy Consistency with Truncated Return Prediction

  • Shuo Wang
  • Zhihao Wu
  • Xiaobo Hu
  • Jinwen Wang
  • Youfang Lin
  • Kai Lv

In visual Reinforcement Learning (RL), the challenge of generalization to new environments is paramount. This study pioneers a theoretical analysis of visual RL generalization, establishing an upper bound on the generalization objective, encompassing policy divergence and Bellman error components. Motivated by this analysis, we propose maintaining the cross-domain consistency for each policy in the policy space, which can reduce the divergence of the learned policy during the test. In practice, we introduce the Truncated Return Prediction (TRP) task, promoting cross-domain policy consistency by predicting truncated returns of historical trajectories. Moreover, we also propose a Transformer-based predictor for this auxiliary task. Extensive experiments on DeepMind Control Suite and Robotic Manipulation tasks demonstrate that TRP achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance. We further demonstrate that TRP outperforms previous methods in terms of sample efficiency during training.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Perturbations for Check-In Sequence Representation Learning

  • Letian Gong
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Yan Lin
  • Tianyi Wang
  • Erwen Zheng
  • Zeyu Zhou
  • Huaiyu Wan

A core step of mining human mobility data is to learn accurate representations for user-generated check-in sequences. The learned representations should be able to fully describe the spatial-temporal mobility patterns of users and the high-level semantics of traveling. However, existing check-in sequence representation learning is usually implicitly achieved by end-to-end models designed for specific downstream tasks, resulting in unsatisfactory generalizable abilities and poor performance. Besides, although the sequence representation learning models that follow the contrastive learning pre-training paradigm have achieved breakthroughs in many fields like NLP, they fail to simultaneously consider the unique spatial-temporal characteristics of check-in sequences and need manual adjustments on the data augmentation strategies. So, directly applying them to check-in sequences cannot yield a meaningful pretext task. To this end, in this paper we propose a contrastive pre-training model with adversarial perturbations for check-in sequence representation learning (CACSR). Firstly, we design a novel spatial-temporal augmentation block for disturbing the spatial-temporal features of check-in sequences in the latent space to relieve the stress of designing manual data augmentation strategies. Secondly, to construct an effective contrastive pretext task, we generate “hard” positive and negative pairs for the check-in sequence by adversarial training. These two designs encourage the model to capture the high-level spatial-temporal patterns and semantics of check-in sequences while ignoring the noisy and unimportant details. We demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of CACSR on two kinds of downstream tasks using three real-world datasets. The results show that our model outperforms both the state-of-the-art pre-training methods and the end-to-end models.

TIST Journal 2023 Journal Article

Enough Waiting for the Couriers: Learning to Estimate Package Pick-up Arrival Time from Couriers’ Spatial-Temporal Behaviors

  • Haomin Wen
  • Youfang Lin
  • Fan Wu
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Zhongxiang Sun
  • Tianyue Cai
  • Hongyu Liu
  • Shengnan Guo

In intelligent logistics systems, predicting the Estimated Time of Pick-up Arrival (ETPA) of packages is a crucial task, which aims to predict the courier’s arrival time to all the unpicked-up packages at any time. Accurate prediction of ETPA can help systems alleviate customers’ waiting anxiety and improve their experience. We identify three main challenges of this problem. First, unlike the travel time estimation problem in other fields like ride-hailing, the ETPA task is distinctively a multi-destination and path-free prediction problem. Second, an intuitive idea for solving ETPA is to predict the pick-up route and then the time in two stages. However, it is difficult to accurately and efficiently predict couriers’ future routes in the route prediction step since their behaviors are affected by multiple complex factors. Third, furthermore, in the time prediction step, the requirement for providing a courier’s all unpicked-up packages’ ETPA at once in real time makes the problem even more challenging. To tackle the preceding challenges, we propose RankETPA, which integrates the route inference into the ETPA prediction. First, a learning-based pick-up route predictor is designed to learn the route-ranking strategies of couriers from their massive spatial-temporal behaviors. Then, a spatial-temporal attention-based arrival time predictor is designed for real-time ETPA inference via capturing the spatial-temporal correlations between the unpicked-up packages. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and a synthetic dataset demonstrate that RankETPA achieves significant performance improvement against the baseline models.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

GMDNet: A Graph-Based Mixture Density Network for Estimating Packages’ Multimodal Travel Time Distribution

  • Xiaowei Mao
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Haomin Wen
  • Fan Wu
  • Jianbin Zheng
  • Yuting Qiang
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Lixia Wu

In the logistics network, accurately estimating packages' Travel Time Distribution (TTD) given the routes greatly benefits both consumers and platforms. Although recent works perform well in predicting an expected time or a time distribution in a road network, they could not be well applied to estimate TTD in logistics networks. Because TTD prediction in the logistics network requires modeling packages' multimodal TTD (MTTD, i.e., there can be more than one likely output with a given input) while leveraging the complex correlations in the logistics network. To this end, this work opens appealing research opportunities in studying MTTD learning conditioned on graph-structure data by investigating packages' travel time distribution in the logistics network. We propose a Graph-based Mixture Density Network, named GMDNet, which takes the benefits of both graph neural network and mixture density network for estimating MTTD conditioned on graph-structure data (i.e., the logistics network). Furthermore, we adopt the Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework in the training process to guarantee local convergence and thus obtain more stable results than gradient descent. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. Corrigendum Notice In the initial publication of this article, the authors (Mao et al. 2023) acknowledged that although it referred to an earlier paper already presented and published in ICML-21 (Errica et al. 2021), it insufficiently acknowledged the extent to which it incorporated and made extensive use of techniques therein. We are providing a Corrigendum Note, "PDF (2024-09-25)," alongside the original published version. The Corrigendum Note summarizes the main novel contributions of this paper. Errica, F.; Bacciu, D.; and Micheli, A. 2021. Graph Mixture Density Networks. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (PMLR-28), 3025–3035. PMLR. Mao, X.; Wan, H.; Wen, H.; Wu, F.; Zheng, J.; Qiang, Y.; Guo, S.; Wu, L.; Hu, H.; and Lin, Y. 2023. GMDNet: A Graph-Based Mixture Density Network for Estimating Packages’ Multimodal Travel Time Distribution. In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Look Beneath the Surface: Exploiting Fundamental Symmetry for Sample-Efficient Offline RL

  • Peng Cheng
  • Xianyuan Zhan
  • Zhihao Wu
  • Wenjia Zhang
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shou cheng Song
  • Han Wang
  • Li Jiang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an appealing approach to real-world tasks by learning policies from pre-collected datasets without interacting with the environment. However, the performance of existing offline RL algorithms heavily depends on the scale and state-action space coverage of datasets. Real-world data collection is often expensive and uncontrollable, leading to small and narrowly covered datasets and posing significant challenges for practical deployments of offline RL. In this paper, we provide a new insight that leveraging the fundamental symmetry of system dynamics can substantially enhance offline RL performance under small datasets. Specifically, we propose a Time-reversal symmetry (T-symmetry) enforced Dynamics Model (TDM), which establishes consistency between a pair of forward and reverse latent dynamics. TDM provides both well-behaved representations for small datasets and a new reliability measure for OOD samples based on compliance with the T-symmetry. These can be readily used to construct a new offline RL algorithm (TSRL) with less conservative policy constraints and a reliable latent space data augmentation procedure. Based on extensive experiments, we find TSRL achieves great performance on small benchmark datasets with as few as 1% of the original samples, which significantly outperforms the recent offline RL algorithms in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. Code is available at: https: //github. com/pcheng2/TSRL

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

WITRAN: Water-wave Information Transmission and Recurrent Acceleration Network for Long-range Time Series Forecasting

  • Yuxin Jia
  • Youfang Lin
  • Xinyan Hao
  • Yan Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Huaiyu Wan

Capturing semantic information is crucial for accurate long-range time series forecasting, which involves modeling global and local correlations, as well as discovering long- and short-term repetitive patterns. Previous works have partially addressed these issues separately, but have not been able to address all of them simultaneously. Meanwhile, their time and memory complexities are still not sufficiently low for long-range forecasting. To address the challenge of capturing different types of semantic information, we propose a novel Water-wave Information Transmission (WIT) framework. This framework captures both long- and short-term repetitive patterns through bi-granular information transmission. It also models global and local correlations by recursively fusing and selecting information using Horizontal Vertical Gated Selective Unit (HVGSU). In addition, to improve the computing efficiency, we propose a generic Recurrent Acceleration Network (RAN) which reduces the time complexity to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{L})$ while maintaining the memory complexity at $\mathcal{O}(L)$. Our proposed method, called Water-wave Information Transmission and Recurrent Acceleration Network (WITRAN), outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 5. 80% and 14. 28% on long-range and ultra-long-range time series forecasting tasks respectively, as demonstrated by experiments on four benchmark datasets. The code is available at: https: //github. com/Water2sea/WITRAN.

TIST Journal 2022 Journal Article

DeepRoute+: Modeling Couriers’ Spatial-temporal Behaviors and Decision Preferences for Package Pick-up Route Prediction

  • Haomin Wen
  • Youfang Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Fan Wu
  • Lixia Wu
  • Chao Song
  • Yinghui Xu

Over 10 billion packages are picked up every day in China. A fundamental task raised in the emerging intelligent logistics systems is the couriers’ package pick-up route prediction, which is beneficial for package dispatching, arrival-time estimation and overdue-risk evaluation, by leveraging the predicted routes to improve those downstream tasks. In the package pick-up scene, the decision-making of a courier is affected by strict spatial-temporal constraints (e.g., package location, promised pick-up time, current time, and courier’s current location). Furthermore, couriers have different decision preferences on various factors (e.g., time factor, distance factor, and balance of both), based on their own perception of the environments and work experience. In this article, we propose a novel model, named DeepRoute+, to predict couriers’ future package pick-up routes according to the couriers’ decision experience and preference learned from the historical behaviors. Specifically, DeepRoute+ consists of three layers: (1) The representation layer produces experience- and preference-aware representations for the unpicked-up packages, in which a decision preference module can dynamically adjust the importance of factors that affects the courier’s decision under the current situation. (2) The transformer encoder layer encodes the representations of packages while considering the spatial-temporal correlations among them. (3) The attention-based decoder layer uses the attention mechanism to generate the whole pick-up route recurrently. Experiments on a real-world logistics dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our model.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Attention-based Multi-Level Fusion Network for Light Field Depth Estimation

  • Jiaxin Chen
  • Shuo Zhang
  • Youfang Lin

Depth estimation from Light Field (LF) images is a crucial basis for LF related applications. Since multiple views with abundant information are available, how to effectively fuse features of these views is a key point for accurate LF depth estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based multi-level fusion network. Combining with the four-branch structure, we design intra-branch fusion strategy and interbranch fusion strategy to hierarchically fuse effective features from different views. By introducing the attention mechanism, features of views with less occlusions and richer textures are selected inside and between these branches to provide more effective information for depth estimation. The depth maps are finally estimated after further aggregation. Experimental results show the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation, which also ranks first in the commonly used HCI 4D Light Field Benchmark.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

GSNet: Learning Spatial-Temporal Correlations from Geographical and Semantic Aspects for Traffic Accident Risk Forecasting

  • Beibei Wang
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Huaiyu Wan

Traffic accident forecasting is of great importance to urban public safety, emergency treatment, and construction planning. However, it is very challenging since traffic accidents are affected by multiple factors, and have multi-scale dependencies on both spatial and temporal dimensional features. Meanwhile, traffic accidents are rare events, which leads to the zero-inflated issue. Existing traffic accident forecasting methods cannot deal with all above problems simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named GSNet, to learn the spatial-temporal correlations from geographical and semantic aspects for traffic accident risk forecasting. In the model, a Spatial-Temporal Geographical Module is designed to capture the geographical spatial-temporal correlations among regions, while a Spatial-Temporal Semantic Module is proposed to model the semantic spatial-temporal correlations among regions. In addition, a weighted loss function is designed to solve the zero-inflated issue. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GSNet against the state-of-the-art baseline methods.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Pre-training Context and Time Aware Location Embeddings from Spatial-Temporal Trajectories for User Next Location Prediction

  • Yan Lin
  • Huaiyu Wan
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Youfang Lin

Pre-training location embeddings from spatial-temporal trajectories is a fundamental procedure and very beneficial for user next location prediction. In the real world, a location usually has variable functionalities under different contextual environments. If the exact functions of a location in the trajectory can be reflected in its embedding, the accuracy of user next location prediction should be improved. Yet, existing location embeddings pre-trained on trajectories are mostly based on distributed word representations, which mix a location’s various functionalities into one latent representation vector. To address this problem, we propose a Context and Time aware Location Embedding (CTLE) model, which calculates a location’s representation vector with consideration of its specific contextual neighbors in trajectories. In this way, the multi-functional properties of locations can be properly tackled. Furthermore, in order to incorporate temporal information in trajectories into location embeddings, we propose a subtle temporal encoding module and a novel pretraining objective, which further improve the quality of location embeddings. We evaluate our proposed model on two real-world mobile user trajectory datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the existing embedding methods, our CTLE model can pre-train higher quality location embeddings and significantly improve the performance of downstream user location prediction models.

IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Removing Foreground Occlusions in Light Field using Micro-lens Dynamic Filter

  • Shuo Zhang
  • Zeqi Shen
  • Youfang Lin

Foreground occlusion removal task aims to automatically detect and remove foreground occlusions and recover background objects. Since for Light Fields (LFs), background objects occluded in some views may be seen in other views, the foreground occlusion removal task for LFs is easy to achieve. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method combining ‘seeking’ and ‘generating’ to recover occluded background. Specifically, the micro-lens dynamic filters are proposed to ‘seek’ occluded background points in shifted micro-lens images and remove occlusions using angular information. The shifted images are then combined to further ‘generate’ background regions to supplement more background details using spatial information. By fully exploring the angular and spatial information in LFs, the dense and complex occlusions can be easily removed. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-arts methods by a large margin.

IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

SalientSleepNet: Multimodal Salient Wave Detection Network for Sleep Staging

  • Ziyu Jia
  • Youfang Lin
  • Jing Wang
  • Xuehui Wang
  • Peiyi Xie
  • Yingbin Zhang

Sleep staging is fundamental for sleep assessment and disease diagnosis. Although previous attempts to classify sleep stages have achieved high classification performance, several challenges remain open: 1) How to effectively extract salient waves in multimodal sleep data; 2) How to capture the multi-scale transition rules among sleep stages; 3) How to adaptively seize the key role of specific modality for sleep staging. To address these challenges, we propose SalientSleepNet, a multimodal salient wave detection network for sleep staging. Specifically, SalientSleepNet is a temporal fully convolutional network based on the $U^2$-Net architecture that is originally proposed for salient object detection in computer vision. It is mainly composed of two independent $U^2$-like streams to extract the salient features from multimodal data, respectively. Meanwhile, the multi-scale extraction module is designed to capture multi-scale transition rules among sleep stages. Besides, the multimodal attention module is proposed to adaptively capture valuable information from multimodal data for the specific sleep stage. Experiments on the two datasets demonstrate that SalientSleepNet outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. It is worth noting that this model has the least amount of parameters compared with the existing deep neural network models.

IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

GraphSleepNet: Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Sleep Stage Classification

  • Ziyu Jia
  • Youfang Lin
  • Jing Wang
  • Ronghao Zhou
  • Xiaojun Ning
  • Yuanlai He
  • Yaoshuai Zhao

Sleep stage classification is essential for sleep assessment and disease diagnosis. However, how to effectively utilize brain spatial features and transition information among sleep stages continues to be challenging. In particular, owing to the limited knowledge of the human brain, predefining a suitable spatial brain connection structure for sleep stage classification remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a novel deep graph neural network, named GraphSleepNet, for automatic sleep stage classification. The main advantage of the GraphSleepNet is to adaptively learn the intrinsic connection among different electroencephalogram (EEG) channels, represented by an adjacency matrix, thereby best serving the spatial-temporal graph convolution network (ST-GCN) for sleep stage classification. Meanwhile, the ST-GCN consists of graph convolutions for extracting spatial features and temporal convolutions for capturing the transition rules among sleep stages. Experiments on the Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) dataset demonstrate that the GraphSleepNet outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional Networks: A New Framework for Spatial-Temporal Network Data Forecasting

  • Chao Song
  • Youfang Lin
  • Shengnan Guo
  • Huaiyu Wan

Spatial-temporal network data forecasting is of great importance in a huge amount of applications for traffic management and urban planning. However, the underlying complex spatial-temporal correlations and heterogeneities make this problem challenging. Existing methods usually use separate components to capture spatial and temporal correlations and ignore the heterogeneities in spatial-temporal data. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional Networks (STSGCN), for spatial-temporal network data forecasting. The model is able to effectively capture the complex localized spatial-temporal correlations through an elaborately designed spatial-temporal synchronous modeling mechanism. Meanwhile, multiple modules for different time periods are designed in the model to effectively capture the heterogeneities in localized spatialtemporal graphs. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets, which demonstrates that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance and consistently outperforms other baselines.

AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Attention Based Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting

  • Shengnan Guo
  • Youfang Lin
  • Ning Feng
  • Chao Song
  • Huaiyu Wan

Forecasting the traffic flows is a critical issue for researchers and practitioners in the field of transportation. However, it is very challenging since the traffic flows usually show high nonlinearities and complex patterns. Most existing traffic flow prediction methods, lacking abilities of modeling the dynamic spatial-temporal correlations of traffic data, thus cannot yield satisfactory prediction results. In this paper, we propose a novel attention based spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ASTGCN) model to solve traffic flow forecasting problem. ASTGCN mainly consists of three independent components to respectively model three temporal properties of traffic flows, i. e. , recent, daily-periodic and weekly-periodic dependencies. More specifically, each component contains two major parts: 1) the spatial-temporal attention mechanism to effectively capture the dynamic spatialtemporal correlations in traffic data; 2) the spatial-temporal convolution which simultaneously employs graph convolutions to capture the spatial patterns and common standard convolutions to describe the temporal features. The output of the three components are weighted fused to generate the final prediction results. Experiments on two real-world datasets from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS) demonstrate that the proposed ASTGCN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

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