Zilin Bian

Xinyi Ning, Zilin Bian, Dachuan Zuo et al.

Accurate and reliable vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for safe autonomous driving. Recent studies have incorporated safety risk into trajectory prediction to quantify dangers posed by surrounding agents. However, most risk-aware approaches use past risk information as a secondary signal to help guide decisions, overlooking its future evolution and uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a risk horizon profiling (RHP) module that incorporates a continuous, learnable potential field model for risk-aware trajectory prediction. The RHP module calculates the spatial-temporal proximity of surrounding objects to profile risk distributions across future horizons, which supports better trajectory prediction by adaptively identifying what human drivers perceive as critical moments. We evaluate our method on two datasets from different driving settings, highD for highway corridors and SHRP2 for urban streets, which cover diverse risk scenarios including safe, near-crash, and crash events. Compared to the baseline methods, our framework achieves a 25.0\% reduction in 5s RMSE on the highD dataset and a 29.1\% reduction in 5s minFDE on SHRP2. These results indicate strong performance for both short and long horizon prediction and robust generalization across highway and urban scenarios. The proposed method enables more realistic AV path planning and strategic selection, thereby supporting safer autonomous driving and more advanced driver-assistance systems. The source code for this work is available at: https://github.com/bilab-nyu/RHP

Tao Li, Zilin Bian, Haozhe Lei et al.

In urban traffic management, the primary challenge of dynamically and efficiently monitoring traffic conditions is compounded by the insufficient utilization of thousands of surveillance cameras along the intelligent transportation system. This paper introduces the multi-level Traffic-responsive Tilt Camera surveillance system (TTC-X), a novel framework designed for dynamic and efficient monitoring and management of traffic in urban networks. By leveraging widely deployed pan-tilt-cameras (PTCs), TTC-X overcomes the limitations of a fixed field of view in traditional surveillance systems by providing mobilized and 360-degree coverage. The innovation of TTC-X lies in the integration of advanced machine learning modules, including a detector-predictor-controller structure, with a novel Predictive Correlated Online Learning (PiCOL) methodology and the Spatial-Temporal Graph Predictor (STGP) for real-time traffic estimation and PTC control. The TTC-X is tested and evaluated under three experimental scenarios (e.g., maximum traffic flow capture, dynamic route planning, traffic state estimation) based on a simulation environment calibrated using real-world traffic data in Brooklyn, New York. The experimental results showed that TTC-X captured over 60\% total number of vehicles at the network level, dynamically adjusted its route recommendation in reaction to unexpected full-lane closure events, and reconstructed link-level traffic states with best MAE less than 1.25 vehicle/hour. Demonstrating scalability, cost-efficiency, and adaptability, TTC-X emerges as a powerful solution for urban traffic management in both cyber-physical and real-world environments.

Tao Li, Zilin Bian, Haozhe Lei et al.

Traditional mobility management strategies emphasize macro-level mobility oversight from traffic-sensing infrastructures, often overlooking safety risks that directly affect road users. To address this, we propose a Digital Twin-based Driver Risk-Aware Intelligent Mobility Analytics (DT-DIMA) system. The DT-DIMA system integrates real-time traffic information from pan-tilt-cameras (PTCs), synchronizes this data into a digital twin to accurately replicate the physical world, and predicts network-wide mobility and safety risks in real time. The system's innovation lies in its integration of spatial-temporal modeling, simulation, and online control modules. Tested and evaluated under normal traffic conditions and incidental situations (e.g., unexpected accidents, pre-planned work zones) in a simulated testbed in Brooklyn, New York, DT-DIMA demonstrated mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) ranging from 8.40% to 15.11% in estimating network-level traffic volume and MAPEs from 0.85% to 12.97% in network-level safety risk prediction. In addition, the highly accurate safety risk prediction enables PTCs to preemptively monitor road segments with high driving risks before incidents take place. Such proactive PTC surveillance creates around a 5-minute lead time in capturing traffic incidents. The DT-DIMA system enables transportation managers to understand mobility not only in terms of traffic patterns but also driver-experienced safety risks, allowing for proactive resource allocation in response to various traffic situations. To the authors' best knowledge, DT-DIMA is the first urban mobility management system that considers both mobility and safety risks based on digital twin architecture.

Xiaoheng Tan, Jiabin Zhang, Yuhui Quan et al.

Deep Video Quality Assessment (VQA) methods have shown impressive high-performance capabilities. Notably, no-reference (NR) VQA methods play a vital role in situations where obtaining reference videos is restricted or not feasible. Nevertheless, as more streaming videos are being created in ultra-high definition (e.g., 4K) to enrich viewers' experiences, the current deep VQA methods face unacceptable computational costs. Furthermore, the resizing, cropping, and local sampling techniques employed in these methods can compromise the details and content of original 4K videos, thereby negatively impacting quality assessment. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient and novel NR 4K VQA technology. Specifically, first, a novel data sampling and training strategy is proposed to tackle the problem of excessive resolution. This strategy allows the VQA Swin Transformer-based model to effectively train and make inferences using the full data of 4K videos on standard consumer-grade GPUs without compromising content or details. Second, a weighting and scoring scheme is developed to mimic the human subjective perception mode, which is achieved by considering the distinct impact of each sub-region within a 4K frame on the overall perception. Third, we incorporate the frequency domain information of video frames to better capture the details that affect video quality, consequently further improving the model's generalizability. To our knowledge, this is the first technology for the NR 4K VQA task. Thorough empirical studies demonstrate it not only significantly outperforms existing methods on a specialized 4K VQA dataset but also achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple open-source NR video quality datasets.

Haicheng Liao, Yongkang Li, Chengyue Wang et al.

The primary goal of traffic accident anticipation is to foresee potential accidents in real time using dashcam videos, a task that is pivotal for enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving technologies. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework, AccNet, which significantly advances the prediction capabilities beyond the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) 2D-based methods by incorporating monocular depth cues for sophisticated 3D scene modeling. Addressing the prevalent challenge of skewed data distribution in traffic accident datasets, we propose the Binary Adaptive Loss for Early Anticipation (BA-LEA). This novel loss function, together with a multi-task learning strategy, shifts the focus of the predictive model towards the critical moments preceding an accident. {We rigorously evaluate the performance of our framework on three benchmark datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D), and DADA-2000 Dataset--demonstrating its superior predictive accuracy through key metrics such as Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA).

Ruixuan Zhang, Beichen Wang, Juexiao Zhang et al.

The increasing availability of traffic videos functioning on a 24/7/365 time scale has the great potential of increasing the spatio-temporal coverage of traffic accidents, which will help improve traffic safety. However, analyzing footage from hundreds, if not thousands, of traffic cameras in a 24/7/365 working protocol remains an extremely challenging task, as current vision-based approaches primarily focus on extracting raw information, such as vehicle trajectories or individual object detection, but require laborious post-processing to derive actionable insights. We propose SeeUnsafe, a new framework that integrates Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents to transform video-based traffic accident analysis from a traditional extraction-then-explanation workflow to a more interactive, conversational approach. This shift significantly enhances processing throughput by automating complex tasks like video classification and visual grounding, while improving adaptability by enabling seamless adjustments to diverse traffic scenarios and user-defined queries. Our framework employs a severity-based aggregation strategy to handle videos of various lengths and a novel multimodal prompt to generate structured responses for review and evaluation and enable fine-grained visual grounding. We introduce IMS (Information Matching Score), a new MLLM-based metric for aligning structured responses with ground truth. We conduct extensive experiments on the Toyota Woven Traffic Safety dataset, demonstrating that SeeUnsafe effectively performs accident-aware video classification and visual grounding by leveraging off-the-shelf MLLMs. Source code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ai4ce/SeeUnsafe}.

Junming Liu, Siyuan Meng, Yanting Gao et al.

Multimodal reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) struggles with incomplete knowledge and hallucination artifacts, challenges that textual Knowledge Graphs (KGs) only partially mitigate due to their modality isolation. While Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) promise enhanced cross-modal understanding, their practical construction is impeded by semantic narrowness of manual text annotations and inherent noise in visual-semantic entity linkages. In this paper, we propose Vision-align-to-Language integrated Knowledge Graph (VaLiK), a novel approach for constructing MMKGs that enhances LLMs reasoning through cross-modal information supplementation. Specifically, we cascade pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to align image features with text, transforming them into descriptions that encapsulate image-specific information. Furthermore, we developed a cross-modal similarity verification mechanism to quantify semantic consistency, effectively filtering out noise introduced during feature alignment. Even without manually annotated image captions, the refined descriptions alone suffice to construct the MMKG. Compared to conventional MMKGs construction paradigms, our approach achieves substantial storage efficiency gains while maintaining direct entity-to-image linkage capability. Experimental results on multimodal reasoning tasks demonstrate that LLMs augmented with VaLiK outperform previous state-of-the-art models. Our code is published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/VaLiK.

Zhaoye Pan, Haozhe Lei, Fan Zuo et al.

This paper studies distributed online convex optimization with time-varying coupled constraints, motivated by distributed online control in network systems. Most prior work assumes a separability condition: the global objective and coupled constraint functions are sums of local costs and individual constraints. In contrast, we study a group of agents, networked via a communication graph, that collectively select actions to minimize a sequence of nonseparable global cost functions and to stratify nonseparable long-term constraints based on full-information feedback and intra-agent communication. We propose a distributed online primal-dual belief consensus algorithm, where each agent maintains and updates a local belief of the global collective decisions, which are repeatedly exchanged with neighboring agents. Unlike the previous consensus primal-dual algorithms under separability that ask agents to only communicate their local decisions, our belief-sharing protocol eliminates coupling between the primal consensus disagreement and the dual constraint violation, yielding sublinear regret and cumulative constraint violation (CCV) bounds, both in $O({T}^{1/2})$, where $T$ denotes the time horizon. Such a result breaks the long-standing $O(T^{3/4})$ barrier for CCV and matches the lower bound of online constrained convex optimization, indicating the online learning efficiency at the cost of communication overhead.

Rui Ma, Zilin Bian, Kaan Ozbay

During large-scale evacuations, concentrated electric vehicle (EV) charging demand can overload fixed charging stations (FCSs), leading to prolonged waiting time and increased risk exposure. To address this challenge, this study proposes dynamically deploying mobile charging trucks (MCTs) to complement FCSs, and develops an Adaptive Risk-aware MCT Deployment (ARMD) framework for real-time operation. It divides the MCT deployment into two problems: risk-aware allocation of MCTs among FCSs and dynamic routing of MCTs to the assigned FCSs, and solves them under an offline-to-online paradigm. The resource allocation problem is formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process, and a multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO)-based policy is developed to coordinate multiple MCTs under decentralized observations. The policy is pre-trained offline in an evacuation simulator and adaptively refined online according to current evacuation context. For routing, a spatio-temporal travel time predictor is developed to support rolling-horizon route updates. The proposed framework is evaluated in a simulated hurricane evacuation environment built using real-world data from Hillsborough County, Florida. Experiments show that ARMD consistently outperforms offline optimization, online heuristic dispatch, and rolling-horizon optimization in reducing risk exposure. For demand perturbation scenarios, ARMD reduces average risk exposure by up to 71.1%, relative to the baseline without MCTs. In the case of fixed e-vehicle charging infrastructure or road link failures, ARMD achieves 39.3% to 60.5% reduction in average risk exposure, with its advantages becoming more pronounced as the severity of disruption increases. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ARMD in enhancing mobile charging operations for realistic scenarios of uncertain evacuation conditions.

Yicheng Zhu, Yang Chen, Tao Li et al.

Autonomous-driving simulators typically trade physical fidelity for scalable parallelism. Physics-based platforms such as CARLA and MetaDrive provide articulated vehicle dynamics and contact, but their non-vectorized interfaces make batched training difficult. GPU-batched systems such as Waymax and GPUDrive scale to hundreds of scenarios by replacing rigid-body physics with simplified kinematic models, omitting tire--road interaction, suspension, contact dynamics, and road-condition-dependent friction. We introduce SceneFactory, a GPU-vectorized platform for procedural scene construction, physics-based multi-agent simulation, and RL in autonomous-driving environments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim + Isaac Lab, SceneFactory represents worlds and agents as batched tensors: control, observations, rewards, resets, and policy inference run as GPU tensor operations over the Isaac Lab tensor API. SceneFactory converts Waymo Open Motion Dataset road topologies into simulation-ready USD worlds, runs many worlds concurrently on one GPU, populates each with multiple articulated PhysX vehicles, and maps precipitation and road-surface type to PhysX material friction coefficients. With GPU vectorization, SceneFactory achieves up to 127$\times$ higher throughput than a non-vectorized PhysX baseline on the same GPU and physics solver, reaching 19,250 controlled-agent simulation steps per second at 256 worlds $\times$ 16 agents. Cross-simulator transfer reveals an asymmetric dynamics gap: physics-grounded RL policies transfer to a simplified kinematic bicycle model with 99.5% success, whereas reverse transfer drops to 47.3%. Under wet-road friction, friction-aware policies reduce mean peak DRAC from 58.7 to 27.8,m/s$^2$ without sacrificing goal reach. SceneFactory shows that scalable autonomous-driving training need not discard articulated rigid-body dynamics or physically grounded road-condition variation.

Haozhe Lei, Ya-Ting Yang, Tao Li et al.

This paper presents the Traffic Adaptive Moving-window Patrolling Algorithm (TAMPA), designed to improve real-time incident management during major events like sports tournaments and concerts. Such events significantly stress transportation networks, requiring efficient and adaptive patrol solutions. TAMPA integrates predictive traffic modeling and real-time complaint estimation, dynamically optimizing patrol deployment. Using dynamic programming, the algorithm continuously adjusts patrol strategies within short planning windows, effectively balancing immediate response and efficient routing. Leveraging the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality, TAMPA detects significant shifts in complaint patterns, triggering proactive adjustments in patrol routes. Theoretical analyses ensure performance remains closely aligned with optimal solutions. Simulation results from an urban traffic network demonstrate TAMPA's superior performance, showing improvements of approximately 87.5\% over stationary methods and 114.2\% over random strategies. Future work includes enhancing adaptability and incorporating digital twin technology for improved predictive accuracy, particularly relevant for events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup at MetLife Stadium.

Xinyi Ning, Zilin Bian, Dachuan Zuo et al.

Accurate vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for ensuring safety and efficiency in fully autonomous driving systems. While existing methods primarily focus on modeling observed motion patterns and interactions with other vehicles, they often neglect the potential risks posed by the uncertain or aggressive behaviors of surrounding vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal risk-attentive trajectory prediction framework that incorporates a risk potential field to assess perceived risks arising from behaviors of nearby vehicles. The framework leverages a spatial-temporal encoder and a risk-attentive feature fusion decoder to embed the risk potential field into the extracted spatial-temporal feature representations for trajectory prediction. A risk-scaled loss function is further designed to improve the prediction accuracy of high-risk scenarios, such as short relative spacing. Experiments on the widely used NGSIM and HighD datasets demonstrate that our method reduces average prediction errors by 4.8% and 31.2% respectively compared to state-of-the-art approaches, especially in high-risk scenarios. The proposed framework provides interpretable, risk-aware predictions, contributing to more robust decision-making for autonomous driving systems.

Haicheng Liao, Yongkang Li, Zhenning Li et al.

Accurately and safely predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is essential for fully realizing autonomous driving (AD). This paper presents the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction model (HLTP++), which emulates human cognitive processes to improve trajectory prediction in AD. HLTP++ incorporates a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the dynamic allocation of attention human drivers exhibit based on factors like spatial orientation, proximity, and driving speed. On the other hand, the "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and human decision-making, drawing parallels to the human memory storage mechanism. Furthermore, we improve the model's efficiency by introducing a new Fourier Adaptive Spike Neural Network (FA-SNN), allowing for faster and more precise predictions with fewer parameters. Evaluated using the NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD benchmarks, HLTP++ demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, which reduces the predicted trajectory error with over 11% on the NGSIM dataset and 25% on the HighD datasets. Moreover, HLTP++ demonstrates strong adaptability in challenging environments with incomplete input data. This marks a significant stride in the journey towards fully AD systems.

Zilin Bian, Jingqin Gao, Kaan Ozbay et al.

While deep learning has shown success in predicting traffic states, most methods treat it as a general prediction task without considering transportation aspects. Recently, graph neural networks have proven effective for this task, but few incorporate external factors that impact roadway capacity and traffic flow. This study introduces the Roadway Capacity Driven Graph Convolution Network (RCDGCN) model, which incorporates static and dynamic roadway capacity attributes in spatio-temporal settings to predict network-wide traffic states. The model was evaluated on two real-world datasets with different transportation factors: the ICM-495 highway network and an urban network in Manhattan, New York City. Results show RCDGCN outperformed baseline methods in forecasting accuracy. Analyses, including ablation experiments, weight analysis, and case studies, investigated the effect of capacity-related factors. The study demonstrates the potential of using RCDGCN for transportation system management.

Zilin Bian, Jingqin Gao, Kaan Ozbay et al.

Although traffic prediction has been receiving considerable attention with a number of successes in the context of intelligent transportation systems, the prediction of traffic states over a complex transportation network that contains different road types has remained a challenge. This study proposes a multi-scale graph wavelet temporal convolution network (MSGWTCN) to predict the traffic states in complex transportation networks. Specifically, a multi-scale spatial block is designed to simultaneously capture the spatial information at different levels, and the gated temporal convolution network is employed to extract the temporal dependencies of the data. The model jointly learns to mount multiple levels of the spatial interactions by stacking graph wavelets with different scales. Two real-world datasets are used in this study to investigate the model performance, including a highway network in Seattle and a dense road network of Manhattan in New York City. Experiment results show that the proposed model outperforms other baseline models. Furthermore, different scales of graph wavelets are found to be effective in extracting local, intermediate and global information at the same time and thus enable the model to learn a complex transportation network topology with various types of road segments. By carefully customizing the scales of wavelets, the model is able to improve the prediction performance and better adapt to different network configurations.

Ruixuan Zhang, Wenyu Han, Zilin Bian et al.

Collecting traffic data is crucial for transportation systems and urban planning, and is often more desirable through easy-to-deploy but power-constrained devices, due to the unavailability or high cost of power and network infrastructure. The limited power means an inevitable trade-off between data collection duration and accuracy/resolution. We introduce a novel learning-based framework that strategically decides observation timings for battery-powered devices and reconstructs the full data stream from sparsely sampled observations, resulting in minimal performance loss and a significantly prolonged system lifetime. Our framework comprises a predictor, a controller, and an estimator. The predictor utilizes historical data to forecast future trends within a fixed time horizon. The controller uses the forecasts to determine the next optimal timing for data collection. Finally, the estimator reconstructs the complete data profile from the sampled observations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on PeMS data by an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) predictor and estimator, and a DRQN (Deep Recurrent Q-Network) controller, and compare it against the baseline that uses Kalman filter and uniform sampling. The results indicate that our method outperforms the baseline, primarily due to the inclusion of more representative data points in the profile, resulting in an overall 10\% improvement in estimation accuracy. Source code will be publicly available.

Ding Wang, Fan Zuo, Jingqin Gao et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected travel behaviors and transportation system operations, and cities are grappling with what policies can be effective for a phased reopening shaped by social distancing. This edition of the white paper updates travel trends and highlights an agent-based simulation model's results to predict the impact of proposed phased reopening strategies. It also introduces a real-time video processing method to measure social distancing through cameras on city streets.