Ziheng Qiao

Kanglong Quan, Zhebing Xia, Linfeng Jiang et al.

Comprehensive and efficient validation of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is critical prior to real-world deployment. While simulation-based testing offers scalability, existing approaches often lack seamless integration with real vehicles and field data, limiting their fidelity in capturing dynamic, real-world interactions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel real-time hybrid digital twin platform. Its core innovation lies in the tight coupling of a high-fidelity CARLA-SUMO co-simulation with a physical test site and vehicle via a low-latency Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication link. A custom-developed middleware serves as the critical bridge, synchronizing a real CAV's kinematic state as a shadow vehicle in the simulation and translating virtual control commands into chassis-actuating Controller Area Network (CAN) messages for closed-loop control. Detailed implementation includes using photogrammetry for full-scale asset reconstruction and a cloud-edge collaborative architecture for scalable, multi-user operation. Experimental results demonstrate stable synchronization and effective closed-loop control with low latency, confirming the platform's practicality for multi-scenario CAV verification.

Hankang Gu, Yuli Zhang, Chengming Wang et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has become a popular approach in traffic signal control (TSC) due to its ability to learn adaptive policies from complex traffic environments. Within DRL-based TSC methods, two primary control paradigms are ``choose phase" and ``switch" strategies. Although the agent in the choose phase paradigm selects the next active phase adaptively, this paradigm may result in unexpected phase sequences for drivers, disrupting their anticipation and potentially compromising safety at intersections. Meanwhile, the switch paradigm allows the agent to decide whether to switch to the next predefined phase or extend the current phase. While this structure maintains a more predictable order, it can lead to unfair and inefficient phase allocations, as certain movements may be extended disproportionately while others are neglected. In this paper, we propose a DRL model, named Deep Hierarchical Cycle Planner (DHCP), to allocate the traffic signal cycle duration hierarchically. A high-level agent first determines the split of the total cycle time between the North-South (NS) and East-West (EW) directions based on the overall traffic state. Then, a low-level agent further divides the allocated duration within each major direction between straight and left-turn movements, enabling more flexible durations for the two movements. We test our model on both real and synthetic road networks, along with multiple sets of real and synthetic traffic flows. Empirical results show our model achieves the best performance over all datasets against baselines.

Ziheng Qiao, Houquan Zhou, Yumeng Liu et al.

One key characteristic of the Chinese spelling check (CSC) task is that incorrect characters are usually similar to the correct ones in either phonetics or glyph. To accommodate this, previous works usually leverage confusion sets, which suffer from two problems, i.e., difficulty in determining which character pairs to include and lack of probabilities to distinguish items in the set. In this paper, we propose a light-weight plug-and-play DISC (i.e., decoding intervention with similarity of characters) module for CSC models.DISC measures phonetic and glyph similarities between characters and incorporates this similarity information only during the inference phase. This method can be easily integrated into various existing CSC models, such as ReaLiSe, SCOPE, and ReLM, without additional training costs. Experiments on three CSC benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves model performance, approaching and even surpassing the current state-of-the-art models.