Harnessing LLMs for Cross-City OD Flow PredictionChenyang Yu, Xinpeng Xie, Yan Huang et al.
Understanding and predicting Origin-Destination (OD) flows is crucial for urban planning and transportation management. Traditional OD prediction models, while effective within single cities, often face limitations when applied across different cities due to varied traffic conditions, urban layouts, and socio-economic factors. In this paper, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a new method for cross-city OD flow prediction. Our approach leverages the advanced semantic understanding and contextual learning capabilities of LLMs to bridge the gap between cities with different characteristics, providing a robust and adaptable solution for accurate OD flow prediction that can be transferred from one city to another. Our novel framework involves four major components: collecting OD training datasets from a source city, instruction-tuning the LLMs, predicting destination POIs in a target city, and identifying the locations that best match the predicted destination POIs. We introduce a new loss function that integrates POI semantics and trip distance during training. By extracting high-quality semantic features from human mobility and POI data, the model understands spatial and functional relationships within urban spaces and captures interactions between individuals and various POIs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art learning-based methods in cross-city OD flow prediction.
Power Battery DetectionXiaoqi Zhao, Peiqian Cao, Chenyang Yu et al.
Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.
4.1LGOct 16, 2025
FUSE-Traffic: Fusion of Unstructured and Structured Data for Event-aware Traffic ForecastingChenyang Yu, Xinpeng Xie, Yan Huang et al.
Accurate traffic forecasting is a core technology for building Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enabling better urban resource allocation and improved travel experiences. With growing urbanization, traffic congestion has intensified, highlighting the need for reliable and responsive forecasting models. In recent years, deep learning, particularly Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), has emerged as the mainstream paradigm in traffic forecasting. GNNs can effectively capture complex spatial dependencies in road network topology and dynamic temporal evolution patterns in traffic flow data. Foundational models such as STGCN and GraphWaveNet, along with more recent developments including STWave and D2STGNN, have achieved impressive performance on standard traffic datasets. These approaches incorporate sophisticated graph convolutional structures and temporal modeling mechanisms, demonstrating particular effectiveness in capturing and forecasting traffic patterns characterized by periodic regularities. To address this challenge, researchers have explored various ways to incorporate event information. Early attempts primarily relied on manually engineered event features. For instance, some approaches introduced manually defined incident effect scores or constructed specific subgraphs for different event-induced traffic conditions. While these methods somewhat enhance responsiveness to specific events, their core drawback lies in a heavy reliance on domain experts' prior knowledge, making generalization to diverse and complex unknown events difficult, and low-dimensional manual features often lead to the loss of rich semantic details.
FlowDistill: Scalable Traffic Flow Prediction via Distillation from LLMsChenyang Yu, Xinpeng Xie, Yan Huang et al.
Accurate traffic flow prediction is vital for optimizing urban mobility, yet it remains difficult in many cities due to complex spatio-temporal dependencies and limited high-quality data. While deep graph-based models demonstrate strong predictive power, their performance often comes at the cost of high computational overhead and substantial training data requirements, making them impractical for deployment in resource-constrained or data-scarce environments. We propose the FlowDistill, a lightweight and scalable traffic prediction framework based on knowledge distillation from large language models (LLMs). In this teacher-student setup, a fine-tuned LLM guides a compact multi-layer perceptron (MLP) student model using a novel combination of the information bottleneck principle and teacher-bounded regression loss, ensuring the distilled model retains only essential and transferable knowledge. Spatial and temporal correlations are explicitly encoded to enhance the model's generalization across diverse urban settings. Despite its simplicity, FlowDistill consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models in prediction accuracy while requiring significantly less training data, and achieving lower memory usage and inference latency, highlighting its efficiency and suitability for real-world, scalable deployment.