Yiru Jiao

Yiru Jiao, Simeon C. Calvert, Sander van Cranenburgh et al.

Accurately and proactively alerting drivers or automated systems to emerging collisions is crucial for road safety, particularly in highly interactive and complex urban environments. However, existing approaches to identifying potential collisions either require labour-intensive annotation of sparse risk, struggle to consider varying contextual factors, or are only useful in specific scenarios. To address these limits, this study introduces the Generalised Surrogate Safety Measure (GSSM), a new data-driven approach that learns collision risk exclusively from naturalistic driving without the need for crash or risk labels. GSSM captures the patterns of normal driving and estimates the extent to which a traffic interaction deviates from the norm towards an unsafe state. Diverse data from naturalistic driving, including motion kinematics, weather, lighting, etc., are used to train multiple GSSMs, which are tested with 2,591 reconstructed real-world crashes and near-crashes. These test events are also released here as the largest dataset of its kind to date. A basic GSSM using only instantaneous motion kinematics achieves an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.9 and secures a median time advance of 2.6 seconds to prevent potential collisions. Additional interaction patterns and contextual factors provide further performance gains. Across various types of collision risk scenarios (such as rear-end, merging, and turning interactions), the accuracy and timeliness of GSSM consistently outperforms existing baselines. GSSM therefore establishes a scalable, context-aware, and generalisable foundation for proactively quantifying collision risk in traffic interactions. This can support and facilitate autonomous driving systems, traffic safety assessment, and road emergency management. Code and experiment data are openly accessible at https://github.com/Yiru-Jiao/GSSM.

Yiru Jiao, Sander van Cranenburgh, Simeon Calvert et al.

The effectiveness of neural network models largely relies on learning meaningful latent patterns from data, where self-supervised learning of informative representations can enhance model performance and generalisability. However, self-supervised representation learning for spatially characterised time series, which are ubiquitous in transportation domain, poses unique challenges due to the necessity of maintaining fine-grained spatio-temporal similarities in the latent space. In this study, we introduce two structure-preserving regularisers for the contrastive learning of spatial time series: one regulariser preserves the topology of similarities between instances, and the other preserves the graph geometry of similarities across spatial and temporal dimensions. To balance the contrastive learning objective and the need for structure preservation, we propose a dynamic weighting mechanism that adaptively manages this trade-off and stabilises training. We validate the proposed method through extensive experiments, including multivariate time series classification to demonstrate its general applicability, as well as macroscopic and microscopic traffic prediction to highlight its particular usefulness in encoding traffic interactions. Across all tasks, our method preserves the similarity structures more effectively and improves state-of-the-art task performances. This method can be integrated with an arbitrary neural network model and is particularly beneficial for time series data with spatial or geographical features. Furthermore, our findings suggest that well-preserved similarity structures in the latent space indicate more informative and useful representations. This provides insights to design more effective neural networks for data-driven transportation research. Our code is made openly accessible with all resulting data at https://github.com/yiru-jiao/spclt