Yajie Zou

Tianyi Zeng, Tianyi Wang, Jiaru Zhang et al.

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools for modeling complex data distributions, yet their purely data-driven nature limits applicability in practical engineering and scientific problems where physical laws need to be followed. This paper proposes Physics-Informed Learning via Diffusion (PILD), a framework that unifies diffusion modeling and first-principles physical constraints by introducing a virtual residual observation sampled from a Laplace distribution to supervise generation during training. To further integrate physical laws, a conditional embedding module is incorporated to inject physical information into the denoising network at multiple layers, ensuring consistent guidance throughout the diffusion process. The proposed PILD framework is concise, modular, and broadly applicable to problems governed by ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, as well as algebraic equations or inequality constraints. Extensive experiments across engineering and scientific tasks including estimating vehicle trajectories, tire forces, Darcy flow and plasma dynamics, demonstrate that our PILD substantially improves accuracy, stability, and generalization over existing physics-informed and diffusion-based baselines.

Tianyi Zeng, Tianyi Wang, Zimo Zeng et al.

Accurate state estimation is fundamental to intelligent vehicles. Wheel load, one of the most important chassis states, serves as an essential input for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and exerts a direct influence on vehicle stability and safety. However, wheel load estimation remains challenging due to the complexity of chassis modeling and the susceptibility of nonlinear systems to noise. To address these issues, this paper first introduces a refined suspension linkage-level modeling approach that constructs a nonlinear instantaneous dynamic model by explicitly considering the complex geometric structure of the suspension. Building upon this, we propose a damper characteristics-based Bayesian physics-informed neural network (Damper-B-PINN) framework to estimate dynamic wheel load, which leverages the suspension dynamics as physical guidance of PINN while employing Bayesian inference to mitigate the effects of system noise and uncertainty. Moreover, a damper-characteristic physics conditioning (DPC) module is designed for embedding physical prior. The proposed Damper-B-PINN is evaluated using both high-fidelity simulation datasets generated by CarSim software and real-world datasets collected from a Formula Student race car. Experimental results demonstrate that our Damper-B-PINN consistently outperforms existing methods across various test conditions, particularly extreme ones. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed Damper-B-PINN framework to enhance the accuracy and robustness of dynamic wheel load estimation, thereby improving the reliability and safety of ADAS applications.

Yuzhi Chen, Yuanchang Xie, Lei Zhao et al.

Multimodal trajectory prediction generates multiple plausible future trajectories to address vehicle motion uncertainty from intention ambiguity and execution variability. However, HD map-dependent models suffer from costly data acquisition, delayed updates, and vulnerability to corrupted inputs, causing prediction failures. Map-free approaches lack global context, with pairwise attention over-amplifying straight patterns while suppressing transitional patterns, resulting in motion-intention misalignment. This paper proposes GContextFormer, a plug-and-play encoder-decoder architecture with global context-aware hybrid attention and scaled additive aggregation achieving intention-aligned multimodal prediction without map reliance. The Motion-Aware Encoder builds scene-level intention prior via bounded scaled additive aggregation over mode-embedded trajectory tokens and refines per-mode representations under shared global context, mitigating inter-mode suppression and promoting intention alignment. The Hierarchical Interaction Decoder decomposes social reasoning into dual-pathway cross-attention: a standard pathway ensures uniform geometric coverage over agent-mode pairs while a neighbor-context-enhanced pathway emphasizes salient interactions, with gating module mediating their contributions to maintain coverage-focus balance. Experiments on eight highway-ramp scenarios from TOD-VT dataset show GContextFormer outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Compared to existing transformer models, GContextFormer achieves greater robustness and concentrated improvements in high-curvature and transition zones via spatial distributions. Interpretability is achieved through motion mode distinctions and neighbor context modulation exposing reasoning attribution. The modular architecture supports extensibility toward cross-domain multimodal reasoning tasks. Source: https://fenghy-chen.github.io/sources/.

Yichen Lu, Kai Cheng, Yue Zhang et al.

The freeway on-ramp merging section is often identified as a crash-prone spot due to the high frequency of traffic conflicts. Very few traffic conflict analysis studies comprehensively consider different vehicle types at freeway merging section. Thus, the main objective of this study is to analyse conflicts between different vehicle types at freeway merging section. Field data are collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) at merging areas in Shanghai, China. Vehicle extraction method is utilized to obtain vehicle trajectories. Time-to-collision (TTC) is utilized as the surrogate safety measure. TTC of car-car conflicts are the smallest while TTC of truck-truck conflicts are the largest. Traffic conflicts frequently occur at on-ramp and acceleration lane. Results show the spatial distribution of lane-change conflicts is significantly different between different vehicle types, suggesting that vehicle drivers should maintain safe distance especially car drivers. Besides, in order to decrease lane-change conflict at merging area, traffic management agencies are suggested to change dotted lie to solid lane at the beginning of acceleration lane.

Yue Zhang, Yajie Zou, Lingtao Wu

In complex lane change (LC) scenarios, semantic interpretation and safety analysis of dynamic interactive pattern are necessary for autonomous vehicles to make appropriate decisions. This study proposes an unsupervised learning framework that combines primitive-based interactive pattern recognition methods and risk analysis methods. The Hidden Markov Model with the Gaussian mixture model (GMM-HMM) approach is developed to decompose the LC scenarios into primitives. Then the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance based K-means clustering is applied to gather the primitives to 13 types of interactive patterns. Finally, this study considers two types of time-to-collision (TTC) involved in the LC process as indicators to analyze the risk of the interactive patterns and extract high-risk LC interactive patterns. The results obtained from The Highway Drone Dataset (highD) demonstrate that the identified LC interactive patterns contain interpretable semantic information. This study explores the spatiotemporal evolution law and risk formation mechanism of the LC interactive patterns and the findings are useful for comprehensively understanding the latent interactive patterns, improving the rationality and safety of autonomous vehicle's decision-making.

Yue Zhang, Yajie Zou, Jinjun Tang et al.

Lane-changing is an important driving behavior and unreasonable lane changes can result in potentially dangerous traffic collisions. Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) can assist drivers to change lanes safely and efficiently. To capture the stochastic time series of lane-changing behavior, this study proposes a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to predict the long-term lane-changing trajectory and behavior. In addition, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) methods are considered as the benchmark models to demonstrate the learning ability of the TCN. The lane-changing dataset was collected by the driving simulator. The prediction performance of TCN is demonstrated from three aspects: different input variables, different input dimensions and different driving scenarios. Prediction results show that the TCN can accurately predict the long-term lane-changing trajectory and driving behavior with shorter computational time compared with two benchmark models. The TCN can provide accurate lane-changing prediction, which is one key information for the development of accurate ADAS.