Zhiyong Cui

LG
h-index31
21papers
2,423citations
Novelty49%
AI Score45

21 Papers

4.6LGSep 19, 2024Code
VCAT: Vulnerability-aware and Curiosity-driven Adversarial Training for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Robustness

Xuan Cai, Zhiyong Cui, Xuesong Bai et al.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) face significant threats to their safe operation in complex traffic environments. Adversarial training has emerged as an effective method of enabling AVs to preemptively fortify their robustness against malicious attacks. Train an attacker using an adversarial policy, allowing the AV to learn robust driving through interaction with this attacker. However, adversarial policies in existing methodologies often get stuck in a loop of overexploiting established vulnerabilities, resulting in poor improvement for AVs. To overcome the limitations, we introduce a pioneering framework termed Vulnerability-aware and Curiosity-driven Adversarial Training (VCAT). Specifically, during the traffic vehicle attacker training phase, a surrogate network is employed to fit the value function of the AV victim, providing dense information about the victim's inherent vulnerabilities. Subsequently, random network distillation is used to characterize the novelty of the environment, constructing an intrinsic reward to guide the attacker in exploring unexplored territories. In the victim defense training phase, the AV is trained in critical scenarios in which the pretrained attacker is positioned around the victim to generate attack behaviors. Experimental results revealed that the training methodology provided by VCAT significantly improved the robust control capabilities of learning-based AVs, outperforming both conventional training modalities and alternative reinforcement learning counterparts, with a marked reduction in crash rates. The code is available at https://github.com/caixxuan/VCAT.

17.2AIJul 19, 2024
KoMA: Knowledge-driven Multi-agent Framework for Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models

Kemou Jiang, Xuan Cai, Zhiyong Cui et al.

Large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents offer a novel avenue for tackling real-world challenges through a knowledge-driven manner. These LLM-enhanced methodologies excel in generalization and interpretability. However, the complexity of driving tasks often necessitates the collaboration of multiple, heterogeneous agents, underscoring the need for such LLM-driven agents to engage in cooperative knowledge sharing and cognitive synergy. Despite the promise of LLMs, current applications predominantly center around single agent scenarios. To broaden the horizons of knowledge-driven strategies and bolster the generalization capabilities of autonomous agents, we propose the KoMA framework consisting of multi-agent interaction, multi-step planning, shared-memory, and ranking-based reflection modules to enhance multi-agents' decision-making in complex driving scenarios. Based on the framework's generated text descriptions of driving scenarios, the multi-agent interaction module enables LLM agents to analyze and infer the intentions of surrounding vehicles, akin to human cognition. The multi-step planning module enables LLM agents to analyze and obtain final action decisions layer by layer to ensure consistent goals for short-term action decisions. The shared memory module can accumulate collective experience to make superior decisions, and the ranking-based reflection module can evaluate and improve agent behavior with the aim of enhancing driving safety and efficiency. The KoMA framework not only enhances the robustness and adaptability of autonomous driving agents but also significantly elevates their generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over traditional methods, particularly in its ability to handle complex, unpredictable driving environments without extensive retraining.

12.8CVSep 2, 2024
Real-time Accident Anticipation for Autonomous Driving Through Monocular Depth-Enhanced 3D Modeling

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).

3.3LGJun 19, 2022
Traffic-Twitter Transformer: A Nature Language Processing-joined Framework For Network-wide Traffic Forecasting

Meng-Ju Tsai, Zhiyong Cui, Hao Yang et al.

With accurate and timely traffic forecasting, the impacted traffic conditions can be predicted in advance to guide agencies and residents to respond to changes in traffic patterns appropriately. However, existing works on traffic forecasting mainly relied on historical traffic patterns confining to short-term prediction, under 1 hour, for instance. To better manage future roadway capacity and accommodate social and human impacts, it is crucial to propose a flexible and comprehensive framework to predict physical-aware long-term traffic conditions for public users and transportation agencies. In this paper, the gap of robust long-term traffic forecasting was bridged by taking social media features into consideration. A correlation study and a linear regression model were first implemented to evaluate the significance of the correlation between two time-series data, traffic intensity and Twitter data intensity. Two time-series data were then fed into our proposed social-aware framework, Traffic-Twitter Transformer, which integrated Nature Language representations into time-series records for long-term traffic prediction. Experimental results in the Great Seattle Area showed that our proposed model outperformed baseline models in all evaluation matrices. This NLP-joined social-aware framework can become a valuable implement of network-wide traffic prediction and management for traffic agencies.

16.8CVDec 6, 2024Code
Stag-1: Towards Realistic 4D Driving Simulation with Video Generation Model

Lening Wang, Wenzhao Zheng, Dalong Du et al.

4D driving simulation is essential for developing realistic autonomous driving simulators. Despite advancements in existing methods for generating driving scenes, significant challenges remain in view transformation and spatial-temporal dynamic modeling. To address these limitations, we propose a Spatial-Temporal simulAtion for drivinG (Stag-1) model to reconstruct real-world scenes and design a controllable generative network to achieve 4D simulation. Stag-1 constructs continuous 4D point cloud scenes using surround-view data from autonomous vehicles. It decouples spatial-temporal relationships and produces coherent keyframe videos. Additionally, Stag-1 leverages video generation models to obtain photo-realistic and controllable 4D driving simulation videos from any perspective. To expand the range of view generation, we train vehicle motion videos based on decomposed camera poses, enhancing modeling capabilities for distant scenes. Furthermore, we reconstruct vehicle camera trajectories to integrate 3D points across consecutive views, enabling comprehensive scene understanding along the temporal dimension. Following extensive multi-level scene training, Stag-1 can simulate from any desired viewpoint and achieve a deep understanding of scene evolution under static spatial-temporal conditions. Compared to existing methods, our approach shows promising performance in multi-view scene consistency, background coherence, and accuracy, and contributes to the ongoing advancements in realistic autonomous driving simulation. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/Stag.

20.0AIFeb 29, 2024Code
A Cognitive-Based Trajectory Prediction Approach for Autonomous Driving

Haicheng Liao, Yongkang Li, Zhenning Li et al.

In autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, the ability to accurately predict the movements of surrounding vehicles is paramount for ensuring safety and operational efficiency. Incorporating human decision-making insights enables AVs to more effectively anticipate the potential actions of other vehicles, significantly improving prediction accuracy and responsiveness in dynamic environments. This paper introduces the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction (HLTP) model, which adopts a teacher-student knowledge distillation framework inspired by human cognitive processes. The HLTP model incorporates a sophisticated teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model, equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the visual processing of the human brain, particularly the functions of the occipital and temporal lobes. The "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and decision-making, drawing parallels to prefrontal and parietal cortex functions. This approach allows for dynamic adaptation to changing driving scenarios, capturing essential perceptual cues for accurate prediction. Evaluated using the Macao Connected and Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) dataset, along with the NGSIM and HighD benchmarks, HLTP demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, particularly in challenging environments with incomplete data. The project page is available at Github.

12.2CEDec 20, 2023
AccidentGPT: Accident Analysis and Prevention from V2X Environmental Perception with Multi-modal Large Model

Lening Wang, Yilong Ren, Han Jiang et al.

Traffic accidents, being a significant contributor to both human casualties and property damage, have long been a focal point of research for many scholars in the field of traffic safety. However, previous studies, whether focusing on static environmental assessments or dynamic driving analyses, as well as pre-accident predictions or post-accident rule analyses, have typically been conducted in isolation. There has been a lack of an effective framework for developing a comprehensive understanding and application of traffic safety. To address this gap, this paper introduces AccidentGPT, a comprehensive accident analysis and prevention multi-modal large model. AccidentGPT establishes a multi-modal information interaction framework grounded in multi-sensor perception, thereby enabling a holistic approach to accident analysis and prevention in the field of traffic safety. Specifically, our capabilities can be categorized as follows: for autonomous driving vehicles, we provide comprehensive environmental perception and understanding to control the vehicle and avoid collisions. For human-driven vehicles, we offer proactive long-range safety warnings and blind-spot alerts while also providing safety driving recommendations and behavioral norms through human-machine dialogue and interaction. Additionally, for traffic police and management agencies, our framework supports intelligent and real-time analysis of traffic safety, encompassing pedestrian, vehicles, roads, and the environment through collaborative perception from multiple vehicles and road testing devices. The system is also capable of providing a thorough analysis of accident causes and liability after vehicle collisions. Our framework stands as the first large model to integrate comprehensive scene understanding into traffic safety studies. Project page: https://accidentgpt.github.io

10.4LGJan 1, 2024
Inferring Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Crashes on Highway Traffic: A Doubly Robust Causal Machine Learning Approach

Shuang Li, Ziyuan Pu, Zhiyong Cui et al.

Highway traffic crashes exert a considerable impact on both transportation systems and the economy. In this context, accurate and dependable emergency responses are crucial for effective traffic management. However, the influence of crashes on traffic status varies across diverse factors and may be biased due to selection bias. Therefore, there arises a necessity to accurately estimate the heterogeneous causal effects of crashes, thereby providing essential insights to facilitate individual-level emergency decision-making. This paper proposes a novel causal machine learning framework to estimate the causal effect of different types of crashes on highway speed. The Neyman-Rubin Causal Model (RCM) is employed to formulate this problem from a causal perspective. The Conditional Shapley Value Index (CSVI) is proposed based on causal graph theory to filter adverse variables, and the Structural Causal Model (SCM) is then adopted to define the statistical estimand for causal effects. The treatment effects are estimated by Doubly Robust Learning (DRL) methods, which combine doubly robust causal inference with classification and regression machine learning models. Experimental results from 4815 crashes on Highway Interstate 5 in Washington State reveal the heterogeneous treatment effects of crashes at varying distances and durations. The rear-end crashes cause more severe congestion and longer durations than other types of crashes, and the sideswipe crashes have the longest delayed impact. Additionally, the findings show that rear-end crashes affect traffic greater at night, while crash to objects has the most significant influence during peak hours. Statistical hypothesis tests, error metrics based on matched "counterfactual outcomes", and sensitive analyses are employed for assessment, and the results validate the accuracy and effectiveness of our method.

21.1SEMar 4, 2025
Text2Scenario: Text-Driven Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving Test

Xuan Cai, Xuesong Bai, Zhiyong Cui et al.

Autonomous driving (AD) testing constitutes a critical methodology for assessing performance benchmarks prior to product deployment. The creation of segmented scenarios within a simulated environment is acknowledged as a robust and effective strategy; however, the process of tailoring these scenarios often necessitates laborious and time-consuming manual efforts, thereby hindering the development and implementation of AD technologies. In response to this challenge, we introduce Text2Scenario, a framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to autonomously generate simulation test scenarios that closely align with user specifications, derived from their natural language inputs. Specifically, an LLM, equipped with a meticulously engineered input prompt scheme functions as a text parser for test scenario descriptions, extracting from a hierarchically organized scenario repository the components that most accurately reflect the user's preferences. Subsequently, by exploiting the precedence of scenario components, the process involves sequentially matching and linking scenario representations within a Domain Specific Language corpus, ultimately fabricating executable test scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that such prompt engineering can meticulously extract the nuanced details of scenario elements embedded within various descriptive formats, with the majority of generated scenarios aligning closely with the user's initial expectations, allowing for the efficient and precise evaluation of diverse AD stacks void of the labor-intensive need for manual scenario configuration. Project page: https://caixxuan.github.io/Text2Scenario.GitHub.io.

6.4LGDec 18, 2024
PreMixer: MLP-Based Pre-training Enhanced MLP-Mixers for Large-scale Traffic Forecasting

Tongtong Zhang, Zhiyong Cui, Bingzhang Wang et al.

In urban computing, precise and swift forecasting of multivariate time series data from traffic networks is crucial. This data incorporates additional spatial contexts such as sensor placements and road network layouts, and exhibits complex temporal patterns that amplify challenges for predictive learning in traffic management, smart mobility demand, and urban planning. Consequently, there is an increasing need to forecast traffic flow across broader geographic regions and for higher temporal coverage. However, current research encounters limitations because of the inherent inefficiency of model and their unsuitability for large-scale traffic network applications due to model complexity. This paper proposes a novel framework, named PreMixer, designed to bridge this gap. It features a predictive model and a pre-training mechanism, both based on the principles of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP). The PreMixer comprehensively consider temporal dependencies of traffic patterns in different time windows and processes the spatial dynamics as well. Additionally, we integrate spatio-temporal positional encoding to manage spatiotemporal heterogeneity without relying on predefined graphs. Furthermore, our innovative pre-training model uses a simple patch-wise MLP to conduct masked time series modeling, learning from long-term historical data segmented into patches to generate enriched contextual representations. This approach enhances the downstream forecasting model without incurring significant time consumption or computational resource demands owing to improved learning efficiency and data handling flexibility. Our framework achieves comparable state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency, as verified by extensive experiments on large-scale traffic datasets.

14.4CVOct 12, 2025
Stability Under Scrutiny: Benchmarking Representation Paradigms for Online HD Mapping

Hao Shan, Ruikai Li, Han Jiang et al.

As one of the fundamental modules in autonomous driving, online high-definition (HD) maps have attracted significant attention due to their cost-effectiveness and real-time capabilities. Since vehicles always cruise in highly dynamic environments, spatial displacement of onboard sensors inevitably causes shifts in real-time HD mapping results, and such instability poses fundamental challenges for downstream tasks. However, existing online map construction models tend to prioritize improving each frame's mapping accuracy, while the mapping stability has not yet been systematically studied. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the temporal stability of online HD mapping models. We propose a multi-dimensional stability evaluation framework with novel metrics for Presence, Localization, and Shape Stability, integrated into a unified mean Average Stability (mAS) score. Extensive experiments on 42 models and variants show that accuracy (mAP) and stability (mAS) represent largely independent performance dimensions. We further analyze the impact of key model design choices on both criteria, identifying architectural and training factors that contribute to high accuracy, high stability, or both. To encourage broader focus on stability, we will release a public benchmark. Our work highlights the importance of treating temporal stability as a core evaluation criterion alongside accuracy, advancing the development of more reliable autonomous driving systems. The benchmark toolkit, code, and models will be available at https://stablehdmap.github.io/.

3.6CVNov 25, 2025
Map-World: Masked Action planning and Path-Integral World Model for Autonomous Driving

Bin Hu, Zijian Lu, Haicheng Liao et al.

Motion planning for autonomous driving must handle multiple plausible futures while remaining computationally efficient. Recent end-to-end systems and world-model-based planners predict rich multi-modal trajectories, but typically rely on handcrafted anchors or reinforcement learning to select a single best mode for training and control. This selection discards information about alternative futures and complicates optimization. We propose MAP-World, a prior-free multi-modal planning framework that couples masked action planning with a path-weighted world model. The Masked Action Planning (MAP) module treats future ego motion as masked sequence completion: past waypoints are encoded as visible tokens, future waypoints are represented as mask tokens, and a driving-intent path provides a coarse scaffold. A compact latent planning state is expanded into multiple trajectory queries with injected noise, yielding diverse, temporally consistent modes without anchor libraries or teacher policies. A lightweight world model then rolls out future BEV semantics conditioned on each candidate trajectory. During training, semantic losses are computed as an expectation over modes, using trajectory probabilities as discrete path weights, so the planner learns from the full distribution of plausible futures instead of a single selected path. On NAVSIM, our method matches anchor-based approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance among world-model-based methods, while avoiding reinforcement learning and maintaining real-time inference latency.

5.7ROAug 2, 2020
Edge Computing for Real-Time Near-Crash Detection for Smart Transportation Applications

Ruimin Ke, Zhiyong Cui, Yanlong Chen et al.

Traffic near-crash events serve as critical data sources for various smart transportation applications, such as being surrogate safety measures for traffic safety research and corner case data for automated vehicle testing. However, there are several key challenges for near-crash detection. First, extracting near-crashes from original data sources requires significant computing, communication, and storage resources. Also, existing methods lack efficiency and transferability, which bottlenecks prospective large-scale applications. To this end, this paper leverages the power of edge computing to address these challenges by processing the video streams from existing dashcams onboard in a real-time manner. We design a multi-thread system architecture that operates on edge devices and model the bounding boxes generated by object detection and tracking in linear complexity. The method is insensitive to camera parameters and backward compatible with different vehicles. The edge computing system has been evaluated with recorded videos and real-world tests on two cars and four buses for over ten thousand hours. It filters out irrelevant videos in real-time thereby saving labor cost, processing time, network bandwidth, and data storage. It collects not only event videos but also other valuable data such as road user type, event location, time to collision, vehicle trajectory, vehicle speed, brake switch, and throttle. The experiments demonstrate the promising performance of the system regarding efficiency, accuracy, reliability, and transferability. It is among the first efforts in applying edge computing for real-time traffic video analytics and is expected to benefit multiple sub-fields in smart transportation research and applications.

17.1LGMay 24, 2020
Stacked Bidirectional and Unidirectional LSTM Recurrent Neural Network for Forecasting Network-wide Traffic State with Missing Values

Zhiyong Cui, Ruimin Ke, Ziyuan Pu et al.

Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially recurrent neural networks (RNN), has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of RNN-based models in traffic forecasting has not yet been fully exploited in terms of the predictive power of spatial-temporal data and the capability of handling missing data. In this paper, we focus on RNN-based models and attempt to reformulate the way to incorporate RNN and its variants into traffic prediction models. A stacked bidirectional and unidirectional LSTM network architecture (SBU-LSTM) is proposed to assist the design of neural network structures for traffic state forecasting. As a key component of the architecture, the bidirectional LSTM (BDLSM) is exploited to capture the forward and backward temporal dependencies in spatiotemporal data. To deal with missing values in spatial-temporal data, we also propose a data imputation mechanism in the LSTM structure (LSTM-I) by designing an imputation unit to infer missing values and assist traffic prediction. The bidirectional version of LSTM-I is incorporated in the SBU-LSTM architecture. Two real-world network-wide traffic state datasets are used to conduct experiments and published to facilitate further traffic prediction research. The prediction performance of multiple types of multi-layer LSTM or BDLSTM models is evaluated. Experimental results indicate that the proposed SBU-LSTM architecture, especially the two-layer BDLSTM network, can achieve superior performance for the network-wide traffic prediction in both accuracy and robustness. Further, comprehensive comparison results show that the proposed data imputation mechanism in the RNN-based models can achieve outstanding prediction performance when the model's input data contains different patterns of missing values.

9.1LGDec 10, 2019
Graph Markov Network for Traffic Forecasting with Missing Data

Zhiyong Cui, Longfei Lin, Ziyuan Pu et al.

Traffic forecasting is a classical task for traffic management and it plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems. However, since traffic data are mostly collected by traffic sensors or probe vehicles, sensor failures and the lack of probe vehicles will inevitably result in missing values in the collected raw data for some specific links in the traffic network. Although missing values can be imputed, existing data imputation methods normally need long-term historical traffic state data. As for short-term traffic forecasting, especially under edge computing and online prediction scenarios, traffic forecasting models with the capability of handling missing values are needed. In this study, we consider the traffic network as a graph and define the transition between network-wide traffic states at consecutive time steps as a graph Markov process. In this way, missing traffic states can be inferred step by step and the spatial-temporal relationships among the roadway links can be Incorporated. Based on the graph Markov process, we propose a new neural network architecture for spatial-temporal data forecasting, i.e. the graph Markov network (GMN). By incorporating the spectral graph convolution operation, we also propose a spectral graph Markov network (SGMN). The proposed models are compared with baseline models and tested on three real-world traffic state datasets with various missing rates. Experimental results show that the proposed GMN and SGMN can achieve superior prediction performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Besides, the proposed models' parameters, weights, and predicted results are comprehensively analyzed and visualized.

2.3SPNov 1, 2019
Road Surface Friction Prediction Using Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network Based on Historical Data

Ziyuan Pu, Shuo Wang, Chenglong Liu et al.

Road surface friction significantly impacts traffic safety and mobility. A precise road surface friction prediction model can help to alleviate the influence of inclement road conditions on traffic safety, Level of Service, traffic mobility, fuel efficiency, and sustained economic productivity. Most related previous studies are laboratory-based methods that are difficult for practical implementation. Moreover, in other data-driven methods, the demonstrated time-series features of road surface conditions have not been considered. This study employed a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to develop a data-driven road surface friction prediction model based on historical data. The proposed prediction model outperformed the other baseline models in terms of the lowest value of predictive performance measurements. The influence of the number of time-lags and the predicting time interval on predictive accuracy was analyzed. In addition, the influence of adding road surface water thickness, road surface temperature and air temperature on predictive accuracy also were investigated. The findings of this study can support road maintenance strategy development and decision making, thus mitigating the impact of inclement road conditions on traffic mobility and safety. Future work includes a modified LSTM-based prediction model development by accommodating flexible time intervals between time-lags.

0.9CVOct 27, 2019
Traffic Sign Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Driving in Virtual Simulation Environment

Meixin Zhu, Jingyun Hu, Ziyuan Pu et al.

This study developed a traffic sign detection and recognition algorithm based on the RetinaNet. Two main aspects were revised to improve the detection of traffic signs: image cropping to address the issue of large image and small traffic signs; and using more anchors with various scales to detect traffic signs with different sizes and shapes. The proposed algorithm was trained and tested in a series of autonomous driving front-view images in a virtual simulation environment. Results show that the algorithm performed extremely well under good illumination and weather conditions. Its drawbacks are that it sometimes failed to detect object under bad weather conditions like snow and failed to distinguish speed limits signs with different limit values.

6.0LGMar 5, 2019
Two-Stream Multi-Channel Convolutional Neural Network (TM-CNN) for Multi-Lane Traffic Speed Prediction Considering Traffic Volume Impact

Ruimin Ke, Wan Li, Zhiyong Cui et al.

Traffic speed prediction is a critically important component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Recently, with the rapid development of deep learning and transportation data science, a growing body of new traffic speed prediction models have been designed, which achieved high accuracy and large-scale prediction. However, existing studies have two major limitations. First, they predict aggregated traffic speed rather than lane-level traffic speed; second, most studies ignore the impact of other traffic flow parameters in speed prediction. To address these issues, we propose a two-stream multi-channel convolutional neural network (TM-CNN) model for multi-lane traffic speed prediction considering traffic volume impact. In this model, we first introduce a new data conversion method that converts raw traffic speed data and volume data into spatial-temporal multi-channel matrices. Then we carefully design a two-stream deep neural network to effectively learn the features and correlations between individual lanes, in the spatial-temporal dimensions, and between speed and volume. Accordingly, a new loss function that considers the volume impact in speed prediction is developed. A case study using one-year data validates the TM-CNN model and demonstrates its superiority. This paper contributes to two research areas: (1) traffic speed prediction, and (2) multi-lane traffic flow study.

9.8LGNov 1, 2018
Forecasting Transportation Network Speed Using Deep Capsule Networks with Nested LSTM Models

Xiaolei Ma, Yi Li, Zhiyong Cui et al.

Accurate and reliable traffic forecasting for complicated transportation networks is of vital importance to modern transportation management. The complicated spatial dependencies of roadway links and the dynamic temporal patterns of traffic states make it particularly challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a new capsule network (CapsNet) to extract the spatial features of traffic networks and utilize a nested LSTM (NLSTM) structure to capture the hierarchical temporal dependencies in traffic sequence data. A framework for network-level traffic forecasting is also proposed by sequentially connecting CapsNet and NLSTM. On the basis of literature review, our study is the first to adopt CapsNet and NLSTM in the field of traffic forecasting. An experiment on a Beijing transportation network with 278 links shows that the proposed framework with the capability of capturing complicated spatiotemporal traffic patterns outperforms multiple state-of-the-art traffic forecasting baseline models. The superiority and feasibility of CapsNet and NLSTM are also demonstrated, respectively, by visualizing and quantitatively evaluating the experimental results.

31.3LGFeb 20, 2018Code
Traffic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: A Deep Learning Framework for Network-Scale Traffic Learning and Forecasting

Zhiyong Cui, Kristian Henrickson, Ruimin Ke et al.

Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network (TGC-LSTM), to learn the interactions between roadways in the traffic network and forecast the network-wide traffic state. We define the traffic graph convolution based on the physical network topology. The relationship between the proposed traffic graph convolution and the spectral graph convolution is also discussed. An L1-norm on graph convolution weights and an L2-norm on graph convolution features are added to the model's loss function to enhance the interpretability of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms baseline methods on two real-world traffic state datasets. The visualization of the graph convolution weights indicates that the proposed framework can recognize the most influential road segments in real-world traffic networks.

22.4LGJan 7, 2018
Deep Bidirectional and Unidirectional LSTM Recurrent Neural Network for Network-wide Traffic Speed Prediction

Zhiyong Cui, Ruimin Ke, Ziyuan Pu et al.

Short-term traffic forecasting based on deep learning methods, especially long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, has received much attention in recent years. However, the potential of deep learning methods in traffic forecasting has not yet fully been exploited in terms of the depth of the model architecture, the spatial scale of the prediction area, and the predictive power of spatial-temporal data. In this paper, a deep stacked bidirectional and unidirectional LSTM (SBU- LSTM) neural network architecture is proposed, which considers both forward and backward dependencies in time series data, to predict network-wide traffic speed. A bidirectional LSTM (BDLSM) layer is exploited to capture spatial features and bidirectional temporal dependencies from historical data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that BDLSTMs have been applied as building blocks for a deep architecture model to measure the backward dependency of traffic data for prediction. The proposed model can handle missing values in input data by using a masking mechanism. Further, this scalable model can predict traffic speed for both freeway and complex urban traffic networks. Comparisons with other classical and state-of-the-art models indicate that the proposed SBU-LSTM neural network achieves superior prediction performance for the whole traffic network in both accuracy and robustness.