Kelvin Lee

Xiaocai Zhang, Hur Lim, Ke Wang et al.

In this study, a modular, data-free pipeline for multi-label intention recognition is proposed for agentic AI applications in transportation. Unlike traditional intent recognition systems that depend on large, annotated corpora and often struggle with fine-grained, multi-label discrimination, our approach eliminates the need for costly data collection while enhancing the accuracy of multi-label intention understanding. Specifically, the overall pipeline, named DMTC, consists of three steps: 1) using prompt engineering to guide large language models (LLMs) to generate diverse synthetic queries in different transport scenarios; 2) encoding each textual query with a Sentence-T5 model to obtain compact semantic embeddings; 3) training a lightweight classifier using a novel online focal-contrastive (OFC) loss that emphasizes hard samples and maximizes inter-class separability. The applicability of the proposed pipeline is demonstrated in an agentic AI application in the maritime transportation context. Extensive experiments show that DMTC achieves a Hamming loss of 5.35% and an AUC of 95.92%, outperforming state-of-the-art multi-label classifiers and recent end-to-end SOTA LLM-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that Sentence-T5 embeddings improve subset accuracy by at least 3.29% over alternative encoders, and integrating the OFC loss yields an additional 0.98% gain compared to standard contrastive objectives. In conclusion, our system seamlessly routes user queries to task-specific modules (e.g., ETA information, traffic risk evaluation, and other typical scenarios in the transportation domain), laying the groundwork for fully autonomous, intention-aware agents without costly manual labelling.

Inon Peled, Kelvin Lee, Yu Jiang et al.

As Public Transport (PT) becomes more dynamic and demand-responsive, it increasingly depends on predictions of transport demand. But how accurate need such predictions be for effective PT operation? We address this question through an experimental case study of PT trips in Metropolitan Copenhagen, Denmark, which we conduct independently of any specific prediction models. First, we simulate errors in demand prediction through unbiased noise distributions that vary considerably in shape. Using the noisy predictions, we then simulate and optimize demand-responsive PT fleets via a linear programming formulation and measure their performance. Our results suggest that the optimized performance is mainly affected by the skew of the noise distribution and the presence of infrequently large prediction errors. In particular, the optimized performance can improve under non-Gaussian vs. Gaussian noise. We also find that dynamic routing could reduce trip time by at least 23% vs. static routing. This reduction is estimated at 809,000 EUR/year in terms of Value of Travel Time Savings for the case study.

Inon Peled, Kelvin Lee, Yu Jiang et al.

This study develops an online predictive optimization framework for dynamically operating a transit service in an area of crowd movements. The proposed framework integrates demand prediction and supply optimization to periodically redesign the service routes based on recently observed demand. To predict demand for the service, we use Quantile Regression to estimate the marginal distribution of movement counts between each pair of serviced locations. The framework then combines these marginals into a joint demand distribution by constructing a Gaussian copula, which captures the structure of correlation between the marginals. For supply optimization, we devise a linear programming model, which simultaneously determines the route structure and the service frequency according to the predicted demand. Importantly, our framework both preserves the uncertainty structure of future demand and leverages this for robust route optimization, while keeping both components decoupled. We evaluate our framework using a real-world case study of autonomous mobility in a university campus in Denmark. The results show that our framework often obtains the ground truth optimal solution, and can outperform conventional methods for route optimization, which do not leverage full predictive distributions.