Understanding Origin-Destination (O-D) travel demand is crucial for transportation management. However, traditional spatial-temporal deep learning models grapple with addressing the sparse and long-tail characteristics in high-resolution O-D matrices and quantifying prediction uncertainty. This dilemma arises from the numerous zeros and over-dispersed demand patterns within these matrices, which challenge the Gaussian assumption inherent to deterministic deep learning models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach: the Spatial-Temporal Tweedie Graph Neural Network (STTD). The STTD introduces the Tweedie distribution as a compelling alternative to the traditional 'zero-inflated' model and leverages spatial and temporal embeddings to parameterize travel demand distributions. Our evaluations using real-world datasets highlight STTD's superiority in providing accurate predictions and precise confidence intervals, particularly in high-resolution scenarios. GitHub code is available online(https://github.com/STTDAnonymous/STTD).
Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work studies the former. Specifically, the Perception and Decision-making Interleaving Transformer (PDiT) network is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the perceiving one focuses on \emph{the environmental perception} by processing the observation at the patch level, whereas the deciding one pays attention to \emph{the decision-making} by conditioning on the history of the desired returns, the perceiver's outputs, and the actions. Such a network design is generally applicable to a lot of deep RL settings, e.g., both the online and offline RL algorithms under environments with either image observations, proprioception observations, or hybrid image-language observations. Extensive experiments show that PDiT can not only achieve superior performance than strong baselines in different settings but also extract explainable feature representations. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/maohangyu/PDiT}.
12 June 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems
A key challenge in reinforcement learning is how to guide agents to efficiently explore sparse reward environments. In order to overcome this challenge, the state-of-the-art methods introduce additional intrinsic rewards based on state-related information, such as the novelty of states. Unfortunately, these methods frequently fail in procedurally-generated tasks, where a different environment is generated in each episode so that the agent is not likely to visit the same state more than once. Recently, some exploration methods designed specifically for procedurally-generated tasks have been proposed. However, they still only consider state-related information, which leads to relatively inefficient exploration. In this work, we propose a novel exploration method, which utilizes cross-episode policy-related information and intraepisode state-related information to jointly encourage exploration in procedurally-generated tasks. In term of policy-related information, we first use an imitator-based unbalanced policy diversity to measure the difference between the agent’s current policy and the agent’s previous policies, and then encourage the agent to maximize this difference. In term of state-related information, we encourage the agent to maximize the state diversity within an episode, thereby visiting as many different states as possible in an episode. We show that our method significantly improves sample efficiency over state-of-the-art methods on three challenging benchmarks, including MiniGrid, MiniWorld, and the sparse-reward version of Procgen.
The integration of heterogeneous spatio-temporal datasets presents a critical challenge in geospatial data science, particularly when combining large-scale, passively collected “big” data with precise but sparse “small” data. In this study, we propose a novel framework—Multi-Channel Spatio-Temporal Data Fusion (MCST-DF)—that leverages transformer-based deep learning to fuse these data sources for accurate network flow estimation. Our approach introduces a Residual Spatio-Temporal Transformer Network (RSTTNet), equipped with a layered attention mechanism and multi-scale embedding architecture to capture both local and global dependencies across space and time. We evaluate the framework using real-world mobile sensing and loop detector data from the London road network, demonstrating over 89% prediction accuracy and outperforming several benchmark deep learning models. This work provides a generalisable solution for spatio-temporal fusion of diverse geospatial data sources and has direct relevance to smart mobility, urban infrastructure monitoring, and the development of spatially informed AI systems.
Time Series Supplier Allocation (TSSA) poses a complex NP-hard challenge, aimed at refining future order dispatching strategies to satisfy order demands with maximum supply efficiency fully. Traditionally derived from financial portfolio management, the Black-Litterman (BL) model offers a new perspective for the TSSA scenario by balancing expected returns against insufficient supply risks. However, its application within TSSA is constrained by the reliance on manually constructed perspective matrices and spatio-temporal market dynamics, coupled with the absence of supervisory signals and data unreliability inherent to supplier information. To solve these limitations, we introduce the pioneering Deep Black-Litterman Model (DBLM), which innovatively adapts the BL model from financial roots to supply chain context. Leveraging the Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNS), DBLM automatically generates future perspective matrices for TSSA, by integrating spatio-temporal dependency. Moreover, a novel Spearman rank correlation distinctively supervises our approach to address the lack of supervisory signals, specifically designed to navigate through the complexities of supplier risks and interactions. This is further enhanced by a masking mechanism aimed at counteracting the biases from unreliable data, thereby improving the model's precision and reliability. Extensive experimentation on two datasets unequivocally demonstrates DBLM's enhanced performance in TSSA, setting new standards for the field. Our findings and methodology are made available for community access and further development.