Rui-Xing Zhang

Ruixing Zhang, Liangzhe Han, Boyi Liu et al.

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of applying deep spatiotemporal methods in traffic forecasting. However, the prediction of origin-destination (OD) demands is still a challenging problem since the number of OD pairs is usually quadratic to the number of stations. In this case, most of the existing spatiotemporal methods fail to handle spatial relations on such a large scale. To address this problem, this paper provides a dynamic graph representation learning framework for OD demands prediction. In particular, a hierarchical memory updater is first proposed to maintain a time-aware representation for each node, and the representations are updated according to the most recently observed OD trips in continuous-time and multiple discrete-time ways. Second, a spatiotemporal propagation mechanism is provided to aggregate representations of neighbor nodes along a random spatiotemporal route which treats origin and destination as two different semantic entities. Last, an objective function is designed to derive the future OD demands according to the most recent node representations, and also to tackle the data sparsity problem in OD prediction. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Rising0321/HMOD.

Ruixing Zhang, Yang Zhang, Tongyu Zhu et al.

Next Location Prediction is a fundamental task in the study of human mobility, with wide-ranging applications in transportation planning, urban governance, and epidemic forecasting. In practice, when humans attempt to predict the next location in a trajectory, they often visualize the trajectory on a map and reason based on road connectivity and movement trends. However, the vast majority of existing next-location prediction models do not reason over maps \textbf{in the way that humans do}. Fortunately, the recent development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has demonstrated strong capabilities in visual perception and even visual reasoning. This opens up a new possibility: by rendering both the road network and trajectory onto an image and leveraging the reasoning abilities of VLMs, we can enable models to perform trajectory inference in a human-like manner. To explore this idea, we first propose a method called Vision-Guided Location Search (VGLS), which evaluates whether a general-purpose VLM is capable of trajectory-based reasoning without modifying any of its internal parameters. Based on insights from the VGLS results, we further propose our main approach: VLMLocPredictor, which is composed of two stages: In the first stage, we design two Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) tasks that help the VLM understand road network and trajectory structures and acquire basic reasoning ability on such visual inputs. In the second stage, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Visual Map Feedback, enabling the model to self-improve its next-location prediction ability through interaction with the environment. Experiments conducted on datasets from four different cities show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and exhibits superior cross-city generalization compared to other LLM-based approaches.