Dongjie Wang

Wei Fan, Pengyang Wang, Dongkun Wang et al.

The distribution shift in Time Series Forecasting (TSF), indicating series distribution changes over time, largely hinders the performance of TSF models. Existing works towards distribution shift in time series are mostly limited in the quantification of distribution and, more importantly, overlook the potential shift between lookback and horizon windows. To address above challenges, we systematically summarize the distribution shift in TSF into two categories. Regarding lookback windows as input-space and horizon windows as output-space, there exist (i) intra-space shift, that the distribution within the input-space keeps shifted over time, and (ii) inter-space shift, that the distribution is shifted between input-space and output-space. Then we introduce, Dish-TS, a general neural paradigm for alleviating distribution shift in TSF. Specifically, for better distribution estimation, we propose the coefficient net (CONET), which can be any neural architectures, to map input sequences into learnable distribution coefficients. To relieve intra-space and inter-space shift, we organize Dish-TS as a Dual-CONET framework to separately learn the distribution of input- and output-space, which naturally captures the distribution difference of two spaces. In addition, we introduce a more effective training strategy for intractable CONET learning. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several datasets coupled with different state-of-the-art forecasting models. Experimental results show Dish-TS consistently boosts them with a more than 20% average improvement. Code is available.

Wangyang Ying, Dongjie Wang, Kunpeng Liu et al.

Feature generation aims to generate new and meaningful features to create a discriminative representation space.A generated feature is meaningful when the generated feature is from a feature pair with inherent feature interaction. In the real world, experienced data scientists can identify potentially useful feature-feature interactions, and generate meaningful dimensions from an exponentially large search space, in an optimal crossing form over an optimal generation path. But, machines have limited human-like abilities.We generalize such learning tasks as self-optimizing feature generation. Self-optimizing feature generation imposes several under-addressed challenges on existing systems: meaningful, robust, and efficient generation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a principled and generic representation-crossing framework to solve self-optimizing feature generation.To achieve hashing representation, we propose a three-step approach: feature discretization, feature hashing, and descriptive summarization. To achieve reinforcement crossing, we develop a hierarchical reinforcement feature crossing approach.We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/yingwangyang/HRC_feature_cross.git.

Dongjie Wang, Chang-Tien Lu, Xinyue Ye et al.

The two fields of urban planning and artificial intelligence (AI) arose and developed separately. However, there is now cross-pollination and increasing interest in both fields to benefit from the advances of the other. In the present paper, we introduce the importance of urban planning from the sustainability, living, economic, disaster, and environmental perspectives. We review the fundamental concepts of urban planning and relate these concepts to crucial open problems of machine learning, including adversarial learning, generative neural networks, deep encoder-decoder networks, conversational AI, and geospatial and temporal machine learning, thereby assaying how AI can contribute to modern urban planning. Thus, a central problem is automated land-use configuration, which is formulated as the generation of land uses and building configuration for a target area from surrounding geospatial, human mobility, social media, environment, and economic activities. Finally, we delineate some implications of AI for urban planning and propose key research areas at the intersection of both topics.

Dongjie Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu et al.

Representation (feature) space is an environment where data points are vectorized, distances are computed, patterns are characterized, and geometric structures are embedded. Extracting a good representation space is critical to address the curse of dimensionality, improve model generalization, overcome data sparsity, and increase the availability of classic models. Existing literature, such as feature engineering and representation learning, is limited in achieving full automation (e.g., over heavy reliance on intensive labor and empirical experiences), explainable explicitness (e.g., traceable reconstruction process and explainable new features), and flexible optimal (e.g., optimal feature space reconstruction is not embedded into downstream tasks). Can we simultaneously address the automation, explicitness, and optimal challenges in representation space reconstruction for a machine learning task? To answer this question, we propose a group-wise reinforcement generation perspective. We reformulate representation space reconstruction into an interactive process of nested feature generation and selection, where feature generation is to generate new meaningful and explicit features, and feature selection is to eliminate redundant features to control feature sizes. We develop a cascading reinforcement learning method that leverages three cascading Markov Decision Processes to learn optimal generation policies to automate the selection of features and operations and the feature crossing. We design a group-wise generation strategy to cross a feature group, an operation, and another feature group to generate new features and find the strategy that can enhance exploration efficiency and augment reward signals of cascading agents. Finally, we present extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, traceability, and explicitness of our system.

Rui Liu, Tao Zhe, Dongjie Wang et al.

The rapid emergence of open-source, locally hosted intelligent agents marks a critical inflection point in human-computer interaction. Systems such as OpenClaw demonstrate that Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can autonomously operate local computing environments, orchestrate workflows, and integrate external tools. However, within the current paradigm, these agents remain conventional applications running on legacy operating systems originally designed for Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) or Command Line Interfaces (CLIs). This architectural mismatch leads to fragmented interaction models, poorly structured permission management (often described as "Shadow AI"), and severe context fragmentation. This paper proposes a new paradigm: a Personal Agent Operating System (AgentOS). In AgentOS, traditional GUI desktops are replaced by a Natural User Interface (NUI) centered on a unified natural language or voice portal. The system core becomes an Agent Kernel that interprets user intent, decomposes tasks, and coordinates multiple agents, while traditional applications evolve into modular Skills-as-Modules enabling users to compose software through natural language rules. We argue that realizing AgentOS fundamentally becomes a Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) problem. The Agent Kernel must operate as a real-time engine for intent mining and knowledge discovery. Viewed through this lens, the operating system becomes a continuous data mining pipeline involving sequential pattern mining for workflow automation, recommender systems for skill retrieval, and dynamically evolving personal knowledge graphs. These challenges define a new research agenda for the KDD community in building the next generation of intelligent computing systems.

Meng Xiao, Dongjie Wang, Min Wu et al.

Feature transformation aims to reconstruct an effective representation space by mathematically refining the existing features. It serves as a pivotal approach to combat the curse of dimensionality, enhance model generalization, mitigate data sparsity, and extend the applicability of classical models. Existing research predominantly focuses on domain knowledge-based feature engineering or learning latent representations. However, these methods, while insightful, lack full automation and fail to yield a traceable and optimal representation space. An indispensable question arises: Can we concurrently address these limitations when reconstructing a feature space for a machine-learning task? Our initial work took a pioneering step towards this challenge by introducing a novel self-optimizing framework. This framework leverages the power of three cascading reinforced agents to automatically select candidate features and operations for generating improved feature transformation combinations. Despite the impressive strides made, there was room for enhancing its effectiveness and generalization capability. In this extended journal version, we advance our initial work from two distinct yet interconnected perspectives: 1) We propose a refinement of the original framework, which integrates a graph-based state representation method to capture the feature interactions more effectively and develop different Q-learning strategies to alleviate Q-value overestimation further. 2) We utilize a new optimization technique (actor-critic) to train the entire self-optimizing framework in order to accelerate the model convergence and improve the feature transformation performance. Finally, to validate the improved effectiveness and generalization capability of our framework, we perform extensive experiments and conduct comprehensive analyses.

Dongjie Wang, Zhengzhang Chen, Jingchao Ni et al.

In this paper, we propose REASON, a novel framework that enables the automatic discovery of both intra-level (i.e., within-network) and inter-level (i.e., across-network) causal relationships for root cause localization. REASON consists of Topological Causal Discovery and Individual Causal Discovery. The Topological Causal Discovery component aims to model the fault propagation in order to trace back to the root causes. To achieve this, we propose novel hierarchical graph neural networks to construct interdependent causal networks by modeling both intra-level and inter-level non-linear causal relations. Based on the learned interdependent causal networks, we then leverage random walks with restarts to model the network propagation of a system fault. The Individual Causal Discovery component focuses on capturing abrupt change patterns of a single system entity. This component examines the temporal patterns of each entity's metric data (i.e., time series), and estimates its likelihood of being a root cause based on the Extreme Value theory. Combining the topological and individual causal scores, the top K system entities are identified as root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

Meng Xiao, Dongjie Wang, Min Wu et al.

The goal of Feature Selection - comprising filter, wrapper, and embedded approaches - is to find the optimal feature subset for designated downstream tasks. Nevertheless, current feature selection methods are limited by: 1) the selection criteria of these methods are varied for different domains, making them hard to generalize; 2) the selection performance of these approaches drops significantly when processing high-dimensional feature space coupled with small sample size. In light of these challenges, we pose the question: can selected feature subsets be more robust, accurate, and input dimensionality agnostic? In this paper, we reformulate the feature selection problem as a deep differentiable optimization task and propose a new research perspective: conceptualizing discrete feature subsetting as continuous embedding space optimization. We introduce a novel and principled framework that encompasses a sequential encoder, an accuracy evaluator, a sequential decoder, and a gradient ascent optimizer. This comprehensive framework includes four important steps: preparation of features-accuracy training data, deep feature subset embedding, gradient-optimized search, and feature subset reconstruction. Specifically, we utilize reinforcement feature selection learning to generate diverse and high-quality training data and enhance generalization. By optimizing reconstruction and accuracy losses, we embed feature selection knowledge into a continuous space using an encoder-evaluator-decoder model structure. We employ a gradient ascent search algorithm to find better embeddings in the learned embedding space. Furthermore, we reconstruct feature selection solutions using these embeddings and select the feature subset with the highest performance for downstream tasks as the optimal subset.

Dongjie Wang, Lingfei Wu, Denghui Zhang et al.

The essential task of urban planning is to generate the optimal land-use configuration of a target area. However, traditional urban planning is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Deep generative learning gives us hope that we can automate this planning process and come up with the ideal urban plans. While remarkable achievements have been obtained, they have exhibited limitations in lacking awareness of: 1) the hierarchical dependencies between functional zones and spatial grids; 2) the peer dependencies among functional zones; and 3) human regulations to ensure the usability of generated configurations. To address these limitations, we develop a novel human-instructed deep hierarchical generative model. We rethink the urban planning generative task from a unique functionality perspective, where we summarize planning requirements into different functionality projections for better urban plan generation. To this end, we develop a three-stage generation process from a target area to zones to grids. The first stage is to label the grids of a target area with latent functionalities to discover functional zones. The second stage is to perceive the planning requirements to form urban functionality projections. We propose a novel module: functionalizer to project the embedding of human instructions and geospatial contexts to the zone-level plan to obtain such projections. Each projection includes the information of land-use portfolios and the structural dependencies across spatial grids in terms of a specific urban function. The third stage is to leverage multi-attentions to model the zone-zone peer dependencies of the functionality projections to generate grid-level land-use configurations. Finally, we present extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Dongjie Wang, Meng Xiao, Min Wu et al.

Feature transformation aims to generate new pattern-discriminative feature space from original features to improve downstream machine learning (ML) task performances. However, the discrete search space for the optimal feature explosively grows on the basis of combinations of features and operations from low-order forms to high-order forms. Existing methods, such as exhaustive search, expansion reduction, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, and iterative greedy, suffer from large search space. Overly emphasizing efficiency in algorithm design usually sacrifices stability or robustness. To fundamentally fill this gap, we reformulate discrete feature transformation as a continuous space optimization task and develop an embedding-optimization-reconstruction framework. This framework includes four steps: 1) reinforcement-enhanced data preparation, aiming to prepare high-quality transformation-accuracy training data; 2) feature transformation operation sequence embedding, intending to encapsulate the knowledge of prepared training data within a continuous space; 3) gradient-steered optimal embedding search, dedicating to uncover potentially superior embeddings within the learned space; 4) transformation operation sequence reconstruction, striving to reproduce the feature transformation solution to pinpoint the optimal feature space.

Meng Xiao, Dongjie Wang, Min Wu et al.

Feature transformation for AI is an essential task to boost the effectiveness and interpretability of machine learning (ML). Feature transformation aims to transform original data to identify an optimal feature space that enhances the performances of a downstream ML model. Existing studies either combines preprocessing, feature selection, and generation skills to empirically transform data, or automate feature transformation by machine intelligence, such as reinforcement learning. However, existing studies suffer from: 1) high-dimensional non-discriminative feature space; 2) inability to represent complex situational states; 3) inefficiency in integrating local and global feature information. To fill the research gap, we formulate the feature transformation task as an iterative, nested process of feature generation and selection, where feature generation is to generate and add new features based on original features, and feature selection is to remove redundant features to control the size of feature space. Finally, we present extensive experiments and case studies to illustrate 24.7\% improvements in F1 scores compared with SOTAs and robustness in high-dimensional data.

Dongjie Wang, Pengyang Wang, Yanjie Fu et al.

Mobile user profiling refers to the efforts of extracting users' characteristics from mobile activities. In order to capture the dynamic varying of user characteristics for generating effective user profiling, we propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework. Considering the objective of teaching an autonomous agent to imitate user mobility based on the user's profile, the user profile is the most accurate when the agent can perfectly mimic the user behavior patterns. The profiling framework is formulated into a reinforcement learning task, where an agent is a next-visit planner, an action is a POI that a user will visit next, and the state of the environment is a fused representation of a user and spatial entities. An event in which a user visits a POI will construct a new state, which helps the agent predict users' mobility more accurately. In the framework, we introduce a spatial Knowledge Graph (KG) to characterize the semantics of user visits over connected spatial entities. Additionally, we develop a mutual-updating strategy to quantify the state that evolves over time. Along these lines, we develop a reinforcement imitative graph learning framework for mobile user profiling. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Dongjie Wang, Kunpeng Liu, Yanyong Huang et al.

Traditional urban planning demands urban experts to spend considerable time and effort producing an optimal urban plan under many architectural constraints. The remarkable imaginative ability of deep generative learning provides hope for renovating urban planning. While automated urban planners have been examined, they are constrained because of the following: 1) neglecting human requirements in urban planning; 2) omitting spatial hierarchies in urban planning, and 3) lacking numerous urban plan data samples. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, deep, human-instructed urban planner. In the preliminary work, we formulate it into an encoder-decoder paradigm. The encoder is to learn the information distribution of surrounding contexts, human instructions, and land-use configuration. The decoder is to reconstruct the land-use configuration and the associated urban functional zones. The reconstruction procedure will capture the spatial hierarchies between functional zones and spatial grids. Meanwhile, we introduce a variational Gaussian mechanism to mitigate the data sparsity issue. Even though early work has led to good results, the performance of generation is still unstable because the way spatial hierarchies are captured may lead to unclear optimization directions. In this journal version, we propose a cascading deep generative framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to solve this problem, inspired by the workflow of urban experts. In particular, the purpose of the first GAN is to build urban functional zones based on information from human instructions and surrounding contexts. The second GAN will produce the land-use configuration based on the functional zones that have been constructed. Additionally, we provide a conditioning augmentation module to augment data samples. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our work.

Meng Xiao, Dongjie Wang, Min Wu et al.

Feature transformation aims to extract a good representation (feature) space by mathematically transforming existing features. It is crucial to address the curse of dimensionality, enhance model generalization, overcome data sparsity, and expand the availability of classic models. Current research focuses on domain knowledge-based feature engineering or learning latent representations; nevertheless, these methods are not entirely automated and cannot produce a traceable and optimal representation space. When rebuilding a feature space for a machine learning task, can these limitations be addressed concurrently? In this extension study, we present a self-optimizing framework for feature transformation. To achieve a better performance, we improved the preliminary work by (1) obtaining an advanced state representation for enabling reinforced agents to comprehend the current feature set better; and (2) resolving Q-value overestimation in reinforced agents for learning unbiased and effective policies. Finally, to make experiments more convincing than the preliminary work, we conclude by adding the outlier detection task with five datasets, evaluating various state representation approaches, and comparing different training strategies. Extensive experiments and case studies show that our work is more effective and superior.

Guojiao Lin, Zhen Meng, Dongjie Wang et al.

Multimodal recommendation systems (MMRS) have received considerable attention from the research community due to their ability to jointly utilize information from user behavior and product images and text. Previous research has two main issues. First, many long-tail items in recommendation systems have limited interaction data, making it difficult to learn comprehensive and informative representations. However, past MMRS studies have overlooked this issue. Secondly, users' modality preferences are crucial to their behavior. However, previous research has primarily focused on learning item modality representations, while user modality representations have remained relatively simplistic.To address these challenges, we propose a novel Graphs and User Modalities Enhancement (GUME) for long-tail multimodal recommendation. Specifically, we first enhance the user-item graph using multimodal similarity between items. This improves the connectivity of long-tail items and helps them learn high-quality representations through graph propagation. Then, we construct two types of user modalities: explicit interaction features and extended interest features. By using the user modality enhancement strategy to maximize mutual information between these two features, we improve the generalization ability of user modality representations. Additionally, we design an alignment strategy for modality data to remove noise from both internal and external perspectives. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Yanyong Huang, Zongxin Shen, Yuxin Cai et al.

Multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has been demonstrated as an effective technique to reduce the dimensionality of multi-view unlabeled data. The existing methods assume that all of views are complete. However, multi-view data are usually incomplete, i.e., a part of instances are presented on some views but not all views. Besides, learning the complete similarity graph, as an important promising technology in existing MUFS methods, cannot achieve due to the missing views. In this paper, we propose a complementary and consensus learning-based incomplete multi-view unsupervised feature selection method (C$^{2}$IMUFS) to address the aforementioned issues. Concretely, C$^{2}$IMUFS integrates feature selection into an extended weighted non-negative matrix factorization model equipped with adaptive learning of view-weights and a sparse $\ell_{2,p}$-norm, which can offer better adaptability and flexibility. By the sparse linear combinations of multiple similarity matrices derived from different views, a complementary learning-guided similarity matrix reconstruction model is presented to obtain the complete similarity graph in each view. Furthermore, C$^{2}$IMUFS learns a consensus clustering indicator matrix across different views and embeds it into a spectral graph term to preserve the local geometric structure. Comprehensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of C$^{2}$IMUFS compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Wangyang Ying, Dongjie Wang, Xuanming Hu et al.

Biomarker discovery is vital in advancing personalized medicine, offering insights into disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic efficacy. Traditionally, the identification and validation of biomarkers heavily depend on extensive experiments and statistical analyses. These approaches are time-consuming, demand extensive domain expertise, and are constrained by the complexity of biological systems. These limitations motivate us to ask: Can we automatically identify the effective biomarker subset without substantial human efforts? Inspired by the success of generative AI, we think that the intricate knowledge of biomarker identification can be compressed into a continuous embedding space, thus enhancing the search for better biomarkers. Thus, we propose a new biomarker identification framework with two important modules:1) training data preparation and 2) embedding-optimization-generation. The first module uses a multi-agent system to automatically collect pairs of biomarker subsets and their corresponding prediction accuracy as training data. These data establish a strong knowledge base for biomarker identification. The second module employs an encoder-evaluator-decoder learning paradigm to compress the knowledge of the collected data into a continuous space. Then, it utilizes gradient-based search techniques and autoregressive-based reconstruction to efficiently identify the optimal subset of biomarkers. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to show the efficiency, robustness, and effectiveness of our method.

Ehtesamul Azim, Dongjie Wang, Yanjie Fu

Our work focuses on anomaly detection in cyber-physical systems. Prior literature has three limitations: (1) Failing to capture long-delayed patterns in system anomalies; (2) Ignoring dynamic changes in sensor connections; (3) The curse of high-dimensional data samples. These limit the detection performance and usefulness of existing works. To address them, we propose a new approach called deep graph stream support vector data description (SVDD) for anomaly detection. Specifically, we first use a transformer to preserve both short and long temporal patterns of monitoring data in temporal embeddings. Then we cluster these embeddings according to sensor type and utilize them to estimate the change in connectivity between various sensors to construct a new weighted graph. The temporal embeddings are mapped to the new graph as node attributes to form weighted attributed graph. We input the graph into a variational graph auto-encoder model to learn final spatio-temporal representation. Finally, we learn a hypersphere that encompasses normal embeddings and predict the system status by calculating the distances between the hypersphere and data samples. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our model, which improves F1-score by 35.87%, AUC by 19.32%, while being 32 times faster than the best baseline at training and inference.

Xuanming Hu, Dongjie Wang, Wangyang Ying et al.

Polymer property performance prediction aims to forecast specific features or attributes of polymers, which has become an efficient approach to measuring their performance. However, existing machine learning models face challenges in effectively learning polymer representations due to low-quality polymer datasets, which consequently impact their overall performance. This study focuses on improving polymer property performance prediction tasks by reconstructing an optimal and explainable descriptor representation space. Nevertheless, prior research such as feature engineering and representation learning can only partially solve this task since they are either labor-incentive or unexplainable. This raises two issues: 1) automatic transformation and 2) explainable enhancement. To tackle these issues, we propose our unique Traceable Group-wise Reinforcement Generation Perspective. Specifically, we redefine the reconstruction of the representation space into an interactive process, combining nested generation and selection. Generation creates meaningful descriptors, and selection eliminates redundancies to control descriptor sizes. Our approach employs cascading reinforcement learning with three Markov Decision Processes, automating descriptor and operation selection, and descriptor crossing. We utilize a group-wise generation strategy to explore and enhance reward signals for cascading agents. Ultimately, we conduct experiments to indicate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Ehtesamul Azim, Dongjie Wang, Kunpeng Liu et al.

Creating an effective representation space is crucial for mitigating the curse of dimensionality, enhancing model generalization, addressing data sparsity, and leveraging classical models more effectively. Recent advancements in automated feature engineering (AutoFE) have made significant progress in addressing various challenges associated with representation learning, issues such as heavy reliance on intensive labor and empirical experiences, lack of explainable explicitness, and inflexible feature space reconstruction embedded into downstream tasks. However, these approaches are constrained by: 1) generation of potentially unintelligible and illogical reconstructed feature spaces, stemming from the neglect of expert-level cognitive processes; 2) lack of systematic exploration, which subsequently results in slower model convergence for identification of optimal feature space. To address these, we introduce an interaction-aware reinforced generation perspective. We redefine feature space reconstruction as a nested process of creating meaningful features and controlling feature set size through selection. We develop a hierarchical reinforcement learning structure with cascading Markov Decision Processes to automate feature and operation selection, as well as feature crossing. By incorporating statistical measures, we reward agents based on the interaction strength between selected features, resulting in intelligent and efficient exploration of the feature space that emulates human decision-making. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our proposed approach.

Hongyu Cao, Kunpeng Liu, Dongjie Wang et al.

Large language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet often rely on shortcuts such as surface pattern matching and answer memorization rather than genuine logical inference. We propose Shortcut-Aware Reasoning Training (SART), a gradient-aware framework that detects and mitigates shortcut-promoting samples via ShortcutScore and gradient surgery. Our method identifies shortcut signals through gradient misalignment with validation objectives and answer-token concentration, and modifies training dynamics accordingly. Experiments on controlled reasoning benchmarks show that SART achieves +16.5% accuracy and +40.2% robustness over the strongest baseline, significantly improving generalization under distribution shifts. Code is available at: https://github.com/fuyanjie/short-cut-aware-data-centric-reasoning.

Xuanming Hu, Wei Fan, Dongjie Wang et al.

Urban planning, which aims to design feasible land-use configurations for target areas, has become increasingly essential due to the high-speed urbanization process in the modern era. However, the traditional urban planning conducted by human designers can be a complex and onerous task. Thanks to the advancement of deep learning algorithms, researchers have started to develop automated planning techniques. While these models have exhibited promising results, they still grapple with a couple of unresolved limitations: 1) Ignoring the relationship between urban functional zones and configurations and failing to capture the relationship among different functional zones. 2) Less interpretable and stable generation process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework based on normalizing flows, namely Dual-stage Urban Flows (DSUF) framework. Specifically, the first stage is to utilize zone-level urban planning flows to generate urban functional zones based on given surrounding contexts and human guidance. Then we employ an Information Fusion Module to capture the relationship among functional zones and fuse the information of different aspects. The second stage is to use configuration-level urban planning flows to obtain land-use configurations derived from fused information. We design several experiments to indicate that our framework can outperform compared to other generative models for the urban planning task.

Dongkun Wang, Wei Fan, Pengyang Wang et al.

Urban traffic speed prediction aims to estimate the future traffic speed for improving the urban transportation services. Enormous efforts have been made on exploiting spatial correlations and temporal dependencies of traffic speed evolving patterns by leveraging explicit spatial relations (geographical proximity) through pre-defined geographical structures ({\it e.g.}, region grids or road networks). While achieving promising results, current traffic speed prediction methods still suffer from ignoring implicit spatial correlations (interactions), which cannot be captured by grid/graph convolutions. To tackle the challenge, we propose a generic model for enabling the current traffic speed prediction methods to preserve implicit spatial correlations. Specifically, we first develop a Dual-Transformer architecture, including a Spatial Transformer and a Temporal Transformer. The Spatial Transformer automatically learns the implicit spatial correlations across the road segments beyond the boundary of geographical structures, while the Temporal Transformer aims to capture the dynamic changing patterns of the implicit spatial correlations. Then, to further integrate both explicit and implicit spatial correlations, we propose a distillation-style learning framework, in which the existing traffic speed prediction methods are considered as the teacher model, and the proposed Dual-Transformer architectures are considered as the student model. The extensive experiments over three real-world datasets indicate significant improvements of our proposed framework over the existing methods.

Le Ma, Ran Zhang, Yikun Han et al.

Vector databases (VDBs) have emerged to manage high-dimensional data that exceed the capabilities of traditional database management systems, and are now tightly integrated with large language models as well as widely applied in modern artificial intelligence systems. Although relatively few studies describe existing or introduce new vector database architectures, the core technologies underlying VDBs, such as approximate nearest neighbor search, have been extensively studied and are well documented in the literature. In this work, we present a comprehensive review of the relevant algorithms to provide a general understanding of this booming research area. Specifically, we first provide a review of storage and retrieval techniques in VDBs, with detailed design principles and technological evolution. Then, we conduct an in-depth comparison of several advanced VDB solutions with their strengths, limitations, and typical application scenarios. Finally, we also outline emerging opportunities for coupling VDBs with large language models, including open research problems and trends, such as novel indexing strategies. This survey aims to serve as a practical resource, enabling readers to quickly gain an overall understanding of the current knowledge landscape in this rapidly developing area.

Ou Zheng, Ruyi Feng, Yufeng Yang et al.

Intelligent Transportation Systems increasingly depend on heterogeneous data from roadside cameras, UAV imagery, LiDAR, and in-vehicle sensors, yet the lack of unified data standards, model interfaces, and evaluation protocols across these sources hampers reproducibility, cross-dataset benchmarking, and cross-region transferability of research findings. Existing trajectory datasets follow incompatible conventions for coordinate systems, object representations, and metadata fields, forcing researchers to build custom preprocessing pipelines for each dataset and simulator combination. To address these challenges, we propose Ozone, a unified platform for transportation research organized around five interconnected layers -- Hardware, Data, Model, Evaluation, and Prototype -- each with standardized schemas, automated conversion pipelines, and interoperable interfaces. In the first release, the data schema unifies four trajectory datasets -- NGSIM, highD, CitySim, and UTE -- into a canonical format with oriented bounding boxes, kinematic variables, and pre-computed surrogate safety measures. Digital-twin maps in CARLA and calibrated traffic models provide integrated benchmarking environments. Case studies in human-factor research, traffic scene generation, and safety-critical modeling demonstrate that Ozone reduces experiment setup time by 85%, achieves 91% cross-city transfer efficiency for safety models, and improves cross-dataset reproducibility to within 3% variance. The source code and datasets are publicly available.

Rui Liu, Steven Jige Quan, Zhong-Ren Peng et al.

As cities evolve over time, challenges such as traffic congestion and functional imbalance increasingly necessitate urban renewal through efficient modification of existing plans, rather than complete re-planning. In practice, even minor urban changes require substantial manual effort to redraw geospatial layouts, slowing the iterative planning and decision-making procedure. Motivated by recent advances in agentic systems and multimodal reasoning, we formulate urban renewal as a machine-executable task that iteratively modifies existing urban plans represented in structured geospatial formats. More specifically, we represent urban layouts using GeoJSON and decompose natural-language editing instructions into hierarchical geometric intents spanning polygon-, line-, and point-level operations. To coordinate interdependent edits across spatial elements and abstraction levels, we propose a hierarchical agentic framework that jointly performs multi-level planning and execution with explicit propagation of intermediate spatial constraints. We further introduce an iterative execution-validation mechanism that mitigates error accumulation and enforces global spatial consistency during multi-step editing. Extensive experiments across diverse urban editing scenarios demonstrate significant improvements in efficiency, robustness, correctness, and spatial validity over existing baselines.

Hongyu Cao, Jinghan Zhang, Kunpeng Liu et al.

Simulation-to-decision learning enables safe policy training in digital environments without risking real-world deployment, and has become essential in mission-critical domains such as supply chains and industrial systems. However, simulators learned from noisy or biased real-world data often exhibit prediction errors in decision-critical regions, leading to unstable action ranking and unreliable policies. Existing approaches either focus on improving average simulation fidelity or adopt conservative regularization, which may cause policy collapse by discarding high-risk high-reward actions. We propose Sim2Act, a robust simulation-to-decision framework that addresses both simulator and policy robustness. First, we introduce an adversarial calibration mechanism that re-weights simulation errors in decision-critical state-action pairs to align surrogate fidelity with downstream decision impact. Second, we develop a group-relative perturbation strategy that stabilizes policy learning under simulator uncertainty without enforcing overly pessimistic constraints. Extensive experiments on multiple supply chain benchmarks demonstrate improved simulation robustness and more stable decision performance under structured and unstructured perturbations.

Yanping Wu, Yanyong Huang, Zhengzhang Chen et al.

Iterative feature space optimization involves systematically evaluating and adjusting the feature space to improve downstream task performance. However, existing works suffer from three key limitations:1) overlooking differences among data samples leads to evaluation bias; 2) tailoring feature spaces to specific machine learning models results in overfitting and poor generalization; 3) requiring the evaluator to be retrained from scratch during each optimization iteration significantly reduces the overall efficiency of the optimization process. To bridge these gaps, we propose a gEneralized Adaptive feature Space Evaluator (EASE) to efficiently produce optimal and generalized feature spaces. This framework consists of two key components: Feature-Sample Subspace Generator and Contextual Attention Evaluator. The first component aims to decouple the information distribution within the feature space to mitigate evaluation bias. To achieve this, we first identify features most relevant to prediction tasks and samples most challenging for evaluation based on feedback from the subsequent evaluator. This decoupling strategy makes the evaluator consistently target the most challenging aspects of the feature space. The second component intends to incrementally capture evolving patterns of the feature space for efficient evaluation. We propose a weighted-sharing multi-head attention mechanism to encode key characteristics of the feature space into an embedding vector for evaluation. Moreover, the evaluator is updated incrementally, retaining prior evaluation knowledge while incorporating new insights, as consecutive feature spaces during the optimization process share partial information. Extensive experiments on fourteen real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our code and data are publicly available.

Lecheng Zheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Dongjie Wang et al.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is crucial for enhancing the reliability and performance of complex systems. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the lack of large-scale, open-source datasets tailored for RCA. To bridge this gap, we introduce LEMMA-RCA, a large dataset designed for diverse RCA tasks across multiple domains and modalities. LEMMA-RCA features various real-world fault scenarios from IT and OT operation systems, encompassing microservices, water distribution, and water treatment systems, with hundreds of system entities involved. We evaluate the quality of LEMMA-RCA by testing the performance of eight baseline methods on this dataset under various settings, including offline and online modes as well as single and multiple modalities. Our experimental results demonstrate the high quality of LEMMA-RCA. The dataset is publicly available at https://lemma-rca.github.io/.

Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Drew Ross, Mohsen Nayebi Kerdabadi et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise for mining Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by reasoning over longitudinal clinical information to capture context-rich patient trajectories. However, leveraging LLMs for structured EHRs (e.g., standardized diagnosis and medication codes) presents two key challenges. First, translating time-stamped EHR sequences into plain text can obscure both temporal structure and code identities, weakening the ability to capture code co-occurrence and longitudinal regularities. Second, unlike cohort-trained predictive models that learn a shared, task-aligned representation space across patients, LLMs are often applied in a case-isolated inference setting where each patient is processed independently without leveraging population-level patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce RePrompT, a time-aware LLM framework that integrates structured EHR encoders through prompt tuning, without modifying underlying architectures. Specifically, RePrompT recurrently incorporates latent states from prior visits to preserve longitudinal information, and injects population-level information through trainable prompt tokens derived from a cohort-trained, task-aligned EHR encoder. Experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate that RePrompT consistently outperforms both EHR-based and LLM-based baselines across multiple clinical prediction tasks.

Yalan Tan, Yanyong Huang, Zongxin Shen et al.

Although multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has demonstrated success in dimensionality reduction for unlabeled multi-view data, most existing methods reduce feature redundancy by focusing on linear correlations among features but often overlook complex nonlinear dependencies. This limits the effectiveness of feature selection. In addition, existing methods fuse similarity graphs from multiple views by employing sample-invariant weights to preserve local structure. However, this process fails to account for differences in local neighborhood clarity among samples within each view, thereby hindering accurate characterization of the intrinsic local structure of the data. In this paper, we propose a Kernel Alignment-based multi-view unsupervised FeatUre selection with Sample-level adaptive graph lEarning method (KAFUSE) to address these issues. Specifically, we first employ kernel alignment with an orthogonal constraint to reduce feature redundancy in both linear and nonlinear relationships. Then, a cross-view consistent similarity graph is learned by applying sample-level fusion to each slice of a tensor formed by stacking similarity graphs from different views, which automatically adjusts the view weights for each sample during fusion. These two steps are integrated into a unified model for feature selection, enabling mutual enhancement between them. Extensive experiments on real multi-view datasets demonstrate the superiority of KAFUSE over state-of-the-art methods.

Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Mohsen Nayebi Kerdabadi, Dongjie Wang et al.

Large-scale Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases have become indispensable in supporting clinical decision-making through data-driven treatment recommendations. However, existing medication recommender methods often struggle with a user (i.e., patient) cold-start problem, where recommendations for new patients are usually unreliable due to the lack of sufficient prescription history for patient profiling. While prior studies have utilized medical knowledge graphs to connect medication concepts through pharmacological or chemical relationships, these methods primarily focus on mitigating the item cold-start issue and fall short in providing personalized recommendations that adapt to individual patient characteristics. Meta-learning has shown promise in handling new users with sparse interactions in recommender systems. However, its application to EHRs remains underexplored due to the unique sequential structure of EHR data. To tackle these challenges, we propose MetaDrug, a multi-level, uncertainty-aware meta-learning framework designed to address the patient cold-start problem in medication recommendation. MetaDrug proposes a novel two-level meta-adaptation mechanism, including self-adaptation, which adapts the model to new patients using their own medical events as support sets to capture temporal dependencies; and peer-adaptation, which adapts the model using similar visits from peer patients to enrich new patient representations. Meanwhile, to further improve meta-adaptation outcomes, we introduce an uncertainty quantification module that ranks the support visits and filters out the unrelated information for adaptation consistency. We evaluate our approach on the MIMIC-III and Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) datasets. Experimental results on both datasets demonstrate that MetaDrug consistently outperforms state-of-the-art medication recommendation methods on cold-start patients.

Zongxin Shen, Yanyong Huang, Dongjie Wang et al.

Incomplete multi-view unsupervised feature selection (IMUFS), which aims to identify representative features from unlabeled multi-view data containing missing values, has received growing attention in recent years. Despite their promising performance, existing methods face three key challenges: 1) by focusing solely on the view-missing problem, they are not well-suited to the more prevalent mixed-missing scenario in practice, where some samples lack entire views or only partial features within views; 2) insufficient utilization of consistency and diversity across views limits the effectiveness of feature selection; and 3) the lack of theoretical analysis makes it unclear how feature selection and data imputation interact during the joint learning process. Being aware of these, we propose CLIM-FS, a novel IMUFS method designed to address the mixed-missing problem. Specifically, we integrate the imputation of both missing views and variables into a feature selection model based on nonnegative orthogonal matrix factorization, enabling the joint learning of feature selection and adaptive data imputation. Furthermore, we fully leverage consensus cluster structure and cross-view local geometrical structure to enhance the synergistic learning process. We also provide a theoretical analysis to clarify the underlying collaborative mechanism of CLIM-FS. Experimental results on eight real-world multi-view datasets demonstrate that CLIM-FS outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Mohsen Nayebi Kerdabadi, Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Chen Chen et al.

In electronic health record (EHR) mining, learning high-quality representations of medical concepts (e.g., standardized diagnosis, medication, and procedure codes) is fundamental for downstream clinical prediction. However, robust concept representation learning is hindered by two key challenges: (i) clinically important cross-type dependencies (e.g., diagnosis-medication and medication-procedure relations) are often missing or incomplete in existing ontology resources, limiting the ability to model complex EHR patterns; and (ii) rich clinical semantics are often missing from structured resources, and even when available as text, are difficult to integrate with KG structure for representation learning. To address these challenges, we present CoMed, an LLM-empowered graph learning framework for medical concept representation. CoMed first builds a global knowledge graph (KG) over medical codes by combining statistically reliable associations mined from EHRs with type-constrained LLM prompting to infer semantic relations. It then utilizes LLMs to enrich the KG into a text-attributed graph by generating node descriptions and edge rationales, providing semantic signals for both concepts and their relationships. Finally, CoMed jointly trains a LoRA-tuned LLaMA text encoder with a heterogeneous GNN, fusing text semantics and graph structure into unified concept embeddings. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV show that CoMed consistently improves prediction performance and serves as an effective plug-in concept encoder for standard EHR pipelines.

Fateme Memar, Tao Zhe, Dongjie Wang

Symbolic regression aims to discover human-interpretable equations that explain observational data. However, existing approaches rely heavily on discrete structure search (e.g., genetic programming), which often leads to high computational cost, unstable performance, and limited scalability to large equation spaces. To address these challenges, we propose SRCO, a unified embedding-driven framework for symbolic regression that transforms symbolic structures into a continuous, optimizable representation space. The framework consists of three key components: (1) structure embedding: we first generate a large pool of exploratory equations using traditional symbolic regression algorithms and train a Transformer model to compress symbolic structures into a continuous embedding space; (2) continuous structure search: the embedding space enables efficient exploration using gradient-based or sampling-based optimization, significantly reducing the cost of navigating the combinatorial structure space; and (3) coefficient optimization: for each discovered structure, we treat symbolic coefficients as learnable parameters and apply gradient optimization to obtain accurate numerical values. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in equation accuracy, robustness, and search efficiency. This work introduces a new paradigm for symbolic regression by bridging symbolic equation discovery with continuous embedding learning and optimization.

Wei Ju, Yifan Wang, Yifang Qin et al. · pku

In recent years, deep learning on graphs has achieved remarkable success in various domains. However, the reliance on annotated graph data remains a significant bottleneck due to its prohibitive cost and time-intensive nature. To address this challenge, self-supervised learning (SSL) on graphs has gained increasing attention and has made significant progress. SSL enables machine learning models to produce informative representations from unlabeled graph data, reducing the reliance on expensive labeled data. While SSL on graphs has witnessed widespread adoption, one critical component, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), has not been thoroughly investigated in the existing literature. Thus, this survey aims to fill this gap by offering a dedicated survey on GCL. We provide a comprehensive overview of the fundamental principles of GCL, including data augmentation strategies, contrastive modes, and contrastive optimization objectives. Furthermore, we explore the extensions of GCL to other aspects of data-efficient graph learning, such as weakly supervised learning, transfer learning, and related scenarios. We also discuss practical applications spanning domains such as drug discovery, genomics analysis, recommender systems, and finally outline the challenges and potential future directions in this field.

Yuxin Cai, Yanyong Huang, Jinyuan Chang et al.

Feature and instance co-selection, which aims to reduce both feature dimensionality and sample size by identifying the most informative features and instances, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, when dealing with unlabeled incomplete multi-view data, where some samples are missing in certain views, existing methods typically first impute the missing data and then concatenate all views into a single dataset for subsequent co-selection. Such a strategy treats co-selection and missing data imputation as two independent processes, overlooking potential interactions between them. The inter-sample relationships gleaned from co-selection can aid imputation, which in turn enhances co-selection performance. Additionally, simply merging multi-view data fails to capture the complementary information among views, ultimately limiting co-selection effectiveness. To address these issues, we propose a novel co-selection method, termed Joint learning of Unsupervised multI-view feature and instance Co-selection with cross-viEw imputation (JUICE). JUICE first reconstructs incomplete multi-view data using available observations, bringing missing data recovery and feature and instance co-selection together in a unified framework. Then, JUICE leverages cross-view neighborhood information to learn inter-sample relationships and further refine the imputation of missing values during reconstruction. This enables the selection of more representative features and instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JUICE outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Wangyang Ying, Dongjie Wang, Haifeng Chen et al.

Feature selection aims to identify the most pattern-discriminative feature subset. In prior literature, filter (e.g., backward elimination) and embedded (e.g., Lasso) methods have hyperparameters (e.g., top-K, score thresholding) and tie to specific models, thus, hard to generalize; wrapper methods search a feature subset in a huge discrete space and is computationally costly. To transform the way of feature selection, we regard a selected feature subset as a selection decision token sequence and reformulate feature selection as a deep sequential generative learning task that distills feature knowledge and generates decision sequences. Our method includes three steps: (1) We develop a deep variational transformer model over a joint of sequential reconstruction, variational, and performance evaluator losses. Our model can distill feature selection knowledge and learn a continuous embedding space to map feature selection decision sequences into embedding vectors associated with utility scores. (2) We leverage the trained feature subset utility evaluator as a gradient provider to guide the identification of the optimal feature subset embedding;(3) We decode the optimal feature subset embedding to autoregressively generate the best feature selection decision sequence with autostop. Extensive experimental results show this generative perspective is effective and generic, without large discrete search space and expert-specific hyperparameters.

Nanxu Gong, Wangyang Ying, Dongjie Wang et al.

Feature selection aims to identify the optimal feature subset for enhancing downstream models. Effective feature selection can remove redundant features, save computational resources, accelerate the model learning process, and improve the model overall performance. However, existing works are often time-intensive to identify the effective feature subset within high-dimensional feature spaces. Meanwhile, these methods mainly utilize a single downstream task performance as the selection criterion, leading to the selected subsets that are not only redundant but also lack generalizability. To bridge these gaps, we reformulate feature selection through a neuro-symbolic lens and introduce a novel generative framework aimed at identifying short and effective feature subsets. More specifically, we found that feature ID tokens of the selected subset can be formulated as symbols to reflect the intricate correlations among features. Thus, in this framework, we first create a data collector to automatically collect numerous feature selection samples consisting of feature ID tokens, model performance, and the measurement of feature subset redundancy. Building on the collected data, an encoder-decoder-evaluator learning paradigm is developed to preserve the intelligence of feature selection into a continuous embedding space for efficient search. Within the learned embedding space, we leverage a multi-gradient search algorithm to find more robust and generalized embeddings with the objective of improving model performance and reducing feature subset redundancy. These embeddings are then utilized to reconstruct the feature ID tokens for executing the final feature selection. Ultimately, comprehensive experiments and case studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Xinyuan Wang, Dongjie Wang, Wangyang Ying et al.

Feature selection prepares the AI-readiness of data by eliminating redundant features. Prior research falls into two primary categories: i) Supervised Feature Selection, which identifies the optimal feature subset based on their relevance to the target variable; ii) Unsupervised Feature Selection, which reduces the feature space dimensionality by capturing the essential information within the feature set instead of using target variable. However, SFS approaches suffer from time-consuming processes and limited generalizability due to the dependence on the target variable and downstream ML tasks. UFS methods are constrained by the deducted feature space is latent and untraceable. To address these challenges, we introduce an innovative framework for feature selection, which is guided by knockoff features and optimized through reinforcement learning, to identify the optimal and effective feature subset. In detail, our method involves generating "knockoff" features that replicate the distribution and characteristics of the original features but are independent of the target variable. Each feature is then assigned a pseudo label based on its correlation with all the knockoff features, serving as a novel metric for feature evaluation. Our approach utilizes these pseudo labels to guide the feature selection process in 3 novel ways, optimized by a single reinforced agent: 1). A deep Q-network, pre-trained with the original features and their corresponding pseudo labels, is employed to improve the efficacy of the exploration process in feature selection. 2). We introduce unsupervised rewards to evaluate the feature subset quality based on the pseudo labels and the feature space reconstruction loss to reduce dependencies on the target variable. 3). A new ε-greedy strategy is used, incorporating insights from the pseudo labels to make the feature selection process more effective.

Manu Redd, Tao Zhe, Dongjie Wang

Natural-language-to-SQL (NL-to-SQL) systems hold promise for democratizing access to structured data, allowing users to query databases without learning SQL. Yet existing systems struggle with realistic spatio-temporal queries, where success requires aligning vague user phrasing with schema-specific categories, handling temporal reasoning, and choosing appropriate outputs. We present an agentic pipeline that extends a naive text-to-SQL baseline (llama-3-sqlcoder-8b) with orchestration by a Mistral-based ReAct agent. The agent can plan, decompose, and adapt queries through schema inspection, SQL generation, execution, and visualization tools. We evaluate on 35 natural-language queries over the NYC and Tokyo check-in dataset, covering spatial, temporal, and multi-dataset reasoning. The agent achieves substantially higher accuracy than the naive baseline 91.4% vs. 28.6% and enhances usability through maps, plots, and structured natural-language summaries. Crucially, our design enables more natural human-database interaction, supporting users who lack SQL expertise, detailed schema knowledge, or prompting skill. We conclude that agentic orchestration, rather than stronger SQL generators alone, is a promising foundation for interactive geospatial assistants.

Dongjie Wang, Yanyong Huang, Wangyang Ying et al.

Tabular data is one of the most widely used formats across industries, driving critical applications in areas such as finance, healthcare, and marketing. In the era of data-centric AI, improving data quality and representation has become essential for enhancing model performance, particularly in applications centered around tabular data. This survey examines the key aspects of tabular data-centric AI, emphasizing feature selection and feature generation as essential techniques for data space refinement. We provide a systematic review of feature selection methods, which identify and retain the most relevant data attributes, and feature generation approaches, which create new features to simplify the capture of complex data patterns. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of current methodologies through an analysis of recent advancements, practical applications, and the strengths and limitations of these techniques. Finally, we outline open challenges and suggest future perspectives to inspire continued innovation in this field.

Wangyang Ying, Cong Wei, Nanxu Gong et al.

Tabular data is one of the most widely used data formats across various domains such as bioinformatics, healthcare, and marketing. As artificial intelligence moves towards a data-centric perspective, improving data quality is essential for enhancing model performance in tabular data-driven applications. This survey focuses on data-driven tabular data optimization, specifically exploring reinforcement learning (RL) and generative approaches for feature selection and feature generation as fundamental techniques for refining data spaces. Feature selection aims to identify and retain the most informative attributes, while feature generation constructs new features to better capture complex data patterns. We systematically review existing generative methods for tabular data engineering, analyzing their latest advancements, real-world applications, and respective strengths and limitations. This survey emphasizes how RL-based and generative techniques contribute to the automation and intelligence of feature engineering. Finally, we summarize the existing challenges and discuss future research directions, aiming to provide insights that drive continued innovation in this field.

Longchao Da, Tiejin Chen, Zhuoheng Li et al.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative, simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies, such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning.

Xinyuan Wang, Dongjie Wang, Wangyang Ying et al.

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model's latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: 1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; 2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a 5\% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

Yanjie Fu, Dongjie Wang, Wangyang Ying et al.

As data continues to grow in scale and complexity, preparing, transforming, and analyzing it remains labor-intensive, repetitive, and difficult to scale. Since data contains knowledge and AI learns knowledge from it, the alignment between AI and data is essential. However, data is often not structured in ways that are optimal for AI utilization. Moreover, an important question arises: how much knowledge can we pack into data through intensive data operations? Autonomous data agents (DataAgents), which integrate LLM reasoning with task decomposition, action reasoning and grounding, and tool calling, can autonomously interpret data task descriptions, decompose tasks into subtasks, reason over actions, ground actions into python code or tool calling, and execute operations. Unlike traditional data management and engineering tools, DataAgents dynamically plan workflows, call powerful tools, and adapt to diverse data tasks at scale. This report argues that DataAgents represent a paradigm shift toward autonomous data-to-knowledge systems. DataAgents are capable of handling collection, integration, preprocessing, selection, transformation, reweighing, augmentation, reprogramming, repairs, and retrieval. Through these capabilities, DataAgents transform complex and unstructured data into coherent and actionable knowledge. We first examine why the convergence of agentic AI and data-to-knowledge systems has emerged as a critical trend. We then define the concept of DataAgents and discuss their architectural design, training strategies, as well as the new skills and capabilities they enable. Finally, we call for concerted efforts to advance action workflow optimization, establish open datasets and benchmark ecosystems, safeguard privacy, balance efficiency with scalability, and develop trustworthy DataAgent guardrails to prevent malicious actions.

Wangyang Ying, Nanxu Gong, Dongjie Wang et al.

Tabular learning transforms raw features into optimized spaces for downstream tasks, but its effectiveness deteriorates under distribution shifts between training and testing data. We formalize this challenge as the Distribution Shift Tabular Learning (DSTL) problem and propose a novel Shift-Aware Feature Transformation (SAFT) framework to address it. SAFT reframes tabular learning from a discrete search task into a continuous representation-generation paradigm, enabling differentiable optimization over transformed feature sets. SAFT integrates three mechanisms to ensure robustness: (i) shift-resistant representation via embedding decorrelation and sample reweighting, (ii) flatness-aware generation through suboptimal embedding averaging, and (iii) normalization-based alignment between training and test distributions. Extensive experiments show that SAFT consistently outperforms prior tabular learning methods in terms of robustness, effectiveness, and generalization ability under diverse real-world distribution shifts.

Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Haoyue Bai, Xinyuan Wang et al.

As cyber-physical systems grow increasingly interconnected and spatially distributed, ensuring their resilience against evolving cyberattacks has become a critical priority. Spatio-Temporal Anomaly detection plays an important role in ensuring system security and operational integrity. However, current data-driven approaches, largely driven by black-box deep learning, face challenges in interpretability, adaptability to distribution shifts, and robustness under evolving system dynamics. In this paper, we advocate for a causal learning perspective to advance anomaly detection in spatially distributed infrastructures that grounds detection in structural cause-effect relationships. We identify and formalize three key directions: causal graph profiling, multi-view fusion, and continual causal graph learning, each offering distinct advantages in uncovering dynamic cause-effect structures across time and space. Drawing on real-world insights from systems such as water treatment infrastructures, we illustrate how causal models provide early warning signals and root cause attribution, addressing the limitations of black-box detectors. Looking ahead, we outline the future research agenda centered on multi-modality, generative AI-driven, and scalable adaptive causal frameworks. Our objective is to lay a new research trajectory toward scalable, adaptive, explainable, and spatially grounded anomaly detection systems. We hope to inspire a paradigm shift in cybersecurity research, promoting causality-driven approaches to address evolving threats in interconnected infrastructures.

Xinhao Zhang, Jinghan Zhang, Fengran Mo et al.

Humans excel in analogical learning and knowledge transfer and, more importantly, possess a unique understanding of identifying appropriate sources of knowledge. From a model's perspective, this presents an interesting challenge. If models could autonomously retrieve knowledge useful for transfer or decision-making to solve problems, they would transition from passively acquiring to actively accessing and learning from knowledge. However, filling models with knowledge is relatively straightforward -- it simply requires more training and accessible knowledge bases. The more complex task is teaching models about which knowledge can be analogized and transferred. Therefore, we design a knowledge augmentation method, LEKA, for knowledge transfer that actively searches for suitable knowledge sources that can enrich the target domain's knowledge. This LEKA method extracts key information from the target domain's textual information, retrieves pertinent data from external data libraries, and harmonizes retrieved data with the target domain data in feature space and marginal probability measures. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments across various domains and demonstrate significant improvements over traditional methods in reducing computational costs, automating data alignment, and optimizing transfer learning outcomes.

Tao Zhe, Haoyu Wang, Bo Luo et al.

Tool invocation is a core capability of agentic systems, yet failures often arise not from individual tool calls but from how multiple tools are organized and executed together. Existing approaches tightly couple tool execution with stepwise language reasoning or explicit planning, leading to brittle behavior and high execution overhead. To overcome these limitations, we revisit tool invocation from the perspective of tool orchestration. Our key insight is that effective orchestration does not require precise dependency graphs or fine-grained planning. Instead, a coarse-grained layer structure suffices to provide global guidance, while execution-time errors can be corrected locally. Specifically, we model tool orchestration as learning a layered execution structure that captures high-level tool dependencies, inducing layer-wise execution through context constraints. To handle execution-time failures, we introduce a schema-aware reflective correction mechanism that detects and repairs errors locally. This design confines errors to individual tool calls and avoids re-planning entire execution trajectories. This structured execution paradigm enables a lightweight and reusable orchestration component for agentic systems. Experimental results show that our approach achieves robust tool execution while reducing execution complexity and overhead. Code will be made publicly available.