Deep Learning on Traffic Prediction: Methods, Analysis and Future Directions

Traffic prediction plays an essential role in intelligent transportation system. Accurate traffic prediction can assist route planing, guide vehicle dispatching, and mitigate traffic congestion. This problem is challenging due to the complicated and dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies between different regions in the road network. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, especially deep learning method, greatly advancing traffic prediction abilities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on deep learning-based approaches in traffic prediction from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we first summarize the existing traffic prediction methods, and give a taxonomy. Second, we list the state-of-the-art approaches in different traffic prediction applications. Third, we comprehensively collect and organize widely used public datasets in the existing literature to facilitate other researchers. Furthermore, we give an evaluation and analysis by conducting extensive experiments to compare the performance of different methods on a real-world public dataset. Finally, we discuss open challenges in this field.Comment: to be published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Cross-City Transfer Learning for Deep Spatio-Temporal Prediction

Spatio-temporal prediction is a key type of tasks in urban computing, e.g., traffic flow and air quality. Adequate data is usually a prerequisite, especially when deep learning is adopted. However, the development levels of different cities are unbalanced, and still many cities suffer from data scarcity. To address the problem, we propose a novel cross-city transfer learning method for deep spatio-temporal prediction tasks, called RegionTrans. RegionTrans aims to effectively transfer knowledge from a data-rich source city to a data-scarce target city. More specifically, we first learn an inter-city region matching function to match each target city region to a similar source city region. A neural network is designed to effectively extract region-level representation for spatio-temporal prediction. Finally, an optimization algorithm is proposed to transfer learned features from the source city to the target city with the region matching function. Using citywide crowd flow prediction as a demonstration experiment, we verify the effectiveness of RegionTrans. Results show that RegionTrans can outperform the state-of-the-art fine-tuning deep spatio-temporal prediction models by reducing up to 10.7% prediction error

Learning Cross-Modal Deep Representations for Robust Pedestrian Detection

This paper presents a novel method for detecting pedestrians under adverse illumination conditions. Our approach relies on a novel cross-modality learning framework and it is based on two main phases. First, given a multimodal dataset, a deep convolutional network is employed to learn a non-linear mapping, modeling the relations between RGB and thermal data. Then, the learned feature representations are transferred to a second deep network, which receives as input an RGB image and outputs the detection results. In this way, features which are both discriminative and robust to bad illumination conditions are learned. Importantly, at test time, only the second pipeline is considered and no thermal data are required. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of- the-art on the challenging KAIST multispectral pedestrian dataset and it is competitive with previous methods on the popular Caltech dataset.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201

Attentive Crowd Flow Machines

Traffic flow prediction is crucial for urban traffic management and public safety. Its key challenges lie in how to adaptively integrate the various factors that affect the flow changes. In this paper, we propose a unified neural network module to address this problem, called Attentive Crowd Flow Machine~(ACFM), which is able to infer the evolution of the crowd flow by learning dynamic representations of temporally-varying data with an attention mechanism. Specifically, the ACFM is composed of two progressive ConvLSTM units connected with a convolutional layer for spatial weight prediction. The first LSTM takes the sequential flow density representation as input and generates a hidden state at each time-step for attention map inference, while the second LSTM aims at learning the effective spatial-temporal feature expression from attentionally weighted crowd flow features. Based on the ACFM, we further build a deep architecture with the application to citywide crowd flow prediction, which naturally incorporates the sequential and periodic data as well as other external influences. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmarks (i.e., crowd flow in Beijing and New York City) show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: ACM MM, full pape

Short-term Road Traffic Prediction based on Deep Cluster at Large-scale Networks

Short-term road traffic prediction (STTP) is one of the most important modules in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, network-level STTP still remains challenging due to the difficulties both in modeling the diverse traffic patterns and tacking high-dimensional time series with low latency. Therefore, a framework combining with a deep clustering (DeepCluster) module is developed for STTP at largescale networks in this paper. The DeepCluster module is proposed to supervise the representation learning in a visualized way from the large unlabeled dataset. More specifically, to fully exploit the traffic periodicity, the raw series is first split into a number of sub-series for triplets generation. The convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with triplet loss are utilized to extract the features of shape by transferring the series into visual images. The shape-based representations are then used for road segments clustering. Thereafter, motivated by the fact that the road segments in a group have similar patterns, a model sharing strategy is further proposed to build recurrent NNs (RNNs)-based predictions through a group-based model (GM), instead of individual-based model (IM) in which one model are built for one road exclusively. Our framework can not only significantly reduce the number of models and cost, but also increase the number of training data and the diversity of samples. In the end, we evaluate the proposed framework over the network of Liuli Bridge in Beijing. Experimental results show that the DeepCluster can effectively cluster the road segments and GM can achieve comparable performance against the IM with less number of models.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures, journa

URBAN-i: From urban scenes to mapping slums, transport modes, and pedestrians in cities using deep learning and computer vision

Within the burgeoning expansion of deep learning and computer vision across the different fields of science, when it comes to urban development, deep learning and computer vision applications are still limited towards the notions of smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Indeed, a wide gap of knowledge appears when it comes to cities and urban regions in less developed countries where the chaos of informality is the dominant scheme. How can deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) untangle the complexities of informality to advance urban modelling and our understanding of cities? Various questions and debates can be raised concerning the future of cities of the North and the South in the paradigm of AI and computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a new method for multipurpose realistic-dynamic urban modelling relying on deep learning and computer vision, using deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), to sense and detect informality and slums in urban scenes from aerial and street view images in addition to detection of pedestrian and transport modes. The model has been trained on images of urban scenes in cities across the globe. The model shows a good validation of understanding a wide spectrum of nuances among the planned and the unplanned regions, including informal and slum areas. We attempt to advance urban modelling for better understanding the dynamics of city developments. We also aim to exemplify the significant impacts of AI in cities beyond how smart cities are discussed and perceived in the mainstream. The algorithms of the URBAN-i model are fully-coded in Python programming with the pre-trained deep learning models to be used as a tool for mapping and city modelling in the various corner of the globe, including informal settlements and slum regions.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Visual Affordance and Function Understanding: A Survey

Nowadays, robots are dominating the manufacturing, entertainment and healthcare industries. Robot vision aims to equip robots with the ability to discover information, understand it and interact with the environment. These capabilities require an agent to effectively understand object affordances and functionalities in complex visual domains. In this literature survey, we first focus on Visual affordances and summarize the state of the art as well as open problems and research gaps. Specifically, we discuss sub-problems such as affordance detection, categorization, segmentation and high-level reasoning. Furthermore, we cover functional scene understanding and the prevalent functional descriptors used in the literature. The survey also provides necessary background to the problem, sheds light on its significance and highlights the existing challenges for affordance and functionality learning.Comment: 26 pages, 22 image

6G White Paper on Machine Learning in Wireless Communication Networks

The focus of this white paper is on machine learning (ML) in wireless communications. 6G wireless communication networks will be the backbone of the digital transformation of societies by providing ubiquitous, reliable, and near-instant wireless connectivity for humans and machines. Recent advances in ML research has led enable a wide range of novel technologies such as self-driving vehicles and voice assistants. Such innovation is possible as a result of the availability of advanced ML models, large datasets, and high computational power. On the other hand, the ever-increasing demand for connectivity will require a lot of innovation in 6G wireless networks, and ML tools will play a major role in solving problems in the wireless domain. In this paper, we provide an overview of the vision of how ML will impact the wireless communication systems. We first give an overview of the ML methods that have the highest potential to be used in wireless networks. Then, we discuss the problems that can be solved by using ML in various layers of the network such as the physical layer, medium access layer, and application layer. Zero-touch optimization of wireless networks using ML is another interesting aspect that is discussed in this paper. Finally, at the end of each section, important research questions that the section aims to answer are presented

Application of Machine Learning in Wireless Networks: Key Techniques and Open Issues

As a key technique for enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML) is capable of solving complex problems without explicit programming. Motivated by its successful applications to many practical tasks like image recognition, both industry and the research community have advocated the applications of ML in wireless communication. This paper comprehensively surveys the recent advances of the applications of ML in wireless communication, which are classified as: resource management in the MAC layer, networking and mobility management in the network layer, and localization in the application layer. The applications in resource management further include power control, spectrum management, backhaul management, cache management, beamformer design and computation resource management, while ML based networking focuses on the applications in clustering, base station switching control, user association and routing. Moreover, literatures in each aspect is organized according to the adopted ML techniques. In addition, several conditions for applying ML to wireless communication are identified to help readers decide whether to use ML and which kind of ML techniques to use, and traditional approaches are also summarized together with their performance comparison with ML based approaches, based on which the motivations of surveyed literatures to adopt ML are clarified. Given the extensiveness of the research area, challenges and unresolved issues are presented to facilitate future studies, where ML based network slicing, infrastructure update to support ML based paradigms, open data sets and platforms for researchers, theoretical guidance for ML implementation and so on are discussed.Comment: 34 pages,8 figure

CityNet: A Multi-city Multi-modal Dataset for Smart City Applications

Data-driven approaches have been applied to many problems in urban computing. However, in the research community, such approaches are commonly studied under data from limited sources, and are thus unable to characterize the complexity of urban data coming from multiple entities and the correlations among them. Consequently, an inclusive and multifaceted dataset is necessary to facilitate more extensive studies on urban computing. In this paper, we present CityNet, a multi-modal urban dataset containing data from 7 cities, each of which coming from 3 data sources. We first present the generation process of CityNet as well as its basic properties. In addition, to facilitate the use of CityNet, we carry out extensive machine learning experiments, including spatio-temporal predictions, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. The experimental results not only provide benchmarks for a wide range of tasks and methods, but also uncover internal correlations among cities and tasks within CityNet that, with adequate leverage, can improve performances on various tasks. With the benchmarking results and the correlations uncovered, we believe that CityNet can contribute to the field of urban computing by supporting research on many advanced topics