Chengxin Wang

Chengxin Wang, Gary Tan, Swagato Barman Roy et al.

Urban spatio-temporal (ST) forecasting is crucial for various urban applications such as intelligent scheduling and trip planning. Previous studies focus on modeling ST correlations among urban locations in offline settings, which often neglect the non-stationary nature of urban ST data, particularly, distribution shifts over time. This oversight can lead to degraded performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first analyze the distribution shifts in urban ST data, and then introduce DOST, a novel online continual learning framework tailored for ST data characteristics. DOST employs an adaptive ST network equipped with a variable-independent adapter to address the unique distribution shifts at each urban location dynamically. Further, to accommodate the gradual nature of these shifts, we also develop an awake-hibernate learning strategy that intermittently fine-tunes the adapter during the online phase to reduce computational overhead. This strategy integrates a streaming memory update mechanism designed for urban ST sequential data, enabling effective network adaptation to new patterns while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results confirm DOST's superiority over state-of-the-art models on four real-world datasets, providing online forecasts within an average of 0.1 seconds and achieving a 12.89% reduction in forecast errors compared to baseline models.

Chengxin Wang, Yuxuan Liang, Gary Tan

Crowd flow forecasting, which aims to predict the crowds entering or leaving certain regions, is a fundamental task in smart cities. One of the key properties of crowd flow data is periodicity: a pattern that occurs at regular time intervals, such as a weekly pattern. To capture such periodicity, existing studies either fuse the periodic hidden states into channels for networks to learn or apply extra periodic strategies to the network architecture. In this paper, we devise a novel periodic residual learning network (PRNet) for a better modeling of periodicity in crowd flow data. Unlike existing methods, PRNet frames the crowd flow forecasting as a periodic residual learning problem by modeling the variation between the inputs (the previous time period) and the outputs (the future time period). Compared to directly predicting crowd flows that are highly dynamic, learning more stationary deviation is much easier, which thus facilitates the model training. Besides, the learned variation enables the network to produce the residual between future conditions and its corresponding weekly observations at each time interval, and therefore contributes to substantially more accurate multi-step ahead predictions. Extensive experiments show that PRNet can be easily integrated into existing models to enhance their predictive performance.

Chengxin Wang, Shaofeng Cai, Gary Tan

Predicting the future paths of an agent's neighbors accurately and in a timely manner is central to the autonomous applications for collision avoidance. Conventional approaches, e.g., LSTM-based models, take considerable computational costs in the prediction, especially for the long sequence prediction. To support more efficient and accurate trajectory predictions, we propose a novel CNN-based spatial-temporal graph framework GraphTCN, which models the spatial interactions as social graphs and captures the spatio-temporal interactions with a modified temporal convolutional network. In contrast to conventional models, both the spatial and temporal modeling of our model are computed within each local time window. Therefore, it can be executed in parallel for much higher efficiency, and meanwhile with accuracy comparable to best-performing approaches. Experimental results confirm that our model achieves better performance in terms of both efficiency and accuracy as compared with state-of-the-art models on various trajectory prediction benchmark datasets.