Spatial Reasoning
FedASTA: Federated adaptive spatial-temporal attention for traffic flow prediction
Li, Kaiyuan, Zhang, Yihan, Chen, Xinlei
Mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices nowadays generate a large amount of heterogeneous spatial-temporal data. It remains a challenging problem to model the spatial-temporal dynamics under privacy concern. Federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a framework to enable model training across distributed devices without sharing original data which reduce privacy concern. Personalized federated learning (PFL) methods further address data heterogenous problem. However, these methods don't consider natural spatial relations among nodes. For the sake of modeling spatial relations, Graph Neural Netowork (GNN) based FL approach have been proposed. But dynamic spatial-temporal relations among edge nodes are not taken into account. Several approaches model spatial-temporal dynamics in a centralized environment, while less effort has been made under federated setting. To overcome these challeges, we propose a novel Federated Adaptive Spatial-Temporal Attention (FedASTA) framework to model the dynamic spatial-temporal relations. On the client node, FedASTA extracts temporal relations and trend patterns from the decomposed terms of original time series. Then, on the server node, FedASTA utilize trend patterns from clients to construct adaptive temporal-spatial aware graph which captures dynamic correlation between clients. Besides, we design a masked spatial attention module with both static graph and constructed adaptive graph to model spatial dependencies among clients. Extensive experiments on five real-world public traffic flow datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-art performance in federated scenario. In addition, the experiments made in centralized setting show the effectiveness of our novel adaptive graph construction approach compared with other popular dynamic spatial-temporal aware methods.
CReMa: Crisis Response through Computational Identification and Matching of Cross-Lingual Requests and Offers Shared on Social Media
Lamsal, Rabindra, Read, Maria Rodriguez, Karunasekera, Shanika, Imran, Muhammad
During times of crisis, social media platforms play a vital role in facilitating communication and coordinating resources. Amidst chaos and uncertainty, communities often rely on these platforms to share urgent pleas for help, extend support, and organize relief efforts. However, the sheer volume of conversations during such periods, which can escalate to unprecedented levels, necessitates the automated identification and matching of requests and offers to streamline relief operations. This study addresses the challenge of efficiently identifying and matching assistance requests and offers on social media platforms during emergencies. We propose CReMa (Crisis Response Matcher), a systematic approach that integrates textual, temporal, and spatial features for multi-lingual request-offer matching. By leveraging CrisisTransformers, a set of pre-trained models specific to crises, and a cross-lingual embedding space, our methodology enhances the identification and matching tasks while outperforming strong baselines such as RoBERTa, MPNet, and BERTweet, in classification tasks, and Universal Sentence Encoder, Sentence Transformers in crisis embeddings generation tasks. We introduce a novel multi-lingual dataset that simulates scenarios of help-seeking and offering assistance on social media across the 16 most commonly used languages in Australia. We conduct comprehensive cross-lingual experiments across these 16 languages, also while examining trade-offs between multiple vector search strategies and accuracy. Additionally, we analyze a million-scale geotagged global dataset to comprehend patterns in relation to seeking help and offering assistance on social media. Overall, these contributions advance the field of crisis informatics and provide benchmarks for future research in the area.
STG-Mamba: Spatial-Temporal Graph Learning via Selective State Space Model
Li, Lincan, Wang, Hanchen, Zhang, Wenjie, Coster, Adelle
Spatial-Temporal Graph (STG) data is characterized as dynamic, heterogenous, and non-stationary, leading to the continuous challenge of spatial-temporal graph learning. In the past few years, various GNN-based methods have been proposed to solely focus on mimicking the relationships among node individuals of the STG network, ignoring the significance of modeling the intrinsic features that exist in STG system over time. In contrast, modern Selective State Space Models (SSSMs) present a new approach which treat STG Network as a system, and meticulously explore the STG system's dynamic state evolution across temporal dimension. In this work, we introduce Spatial-Temporal Graph Mamba (STG-Mamba) as the first exploration of leveraging the powerful selective state space models for STG learning by treating STG Network as a system, and employing the Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space Module (ST-S3M) to precisely focus on the selected STG latent features. Furthermore, to strengthen GNN's ability of modeling STG data under the setting of selective state space models, we propose Kalman Filtering Graph Neural Networks (KFGN) for dynamically integrate and upgrade the STG embeddings from different temporal granularities through a learnable Kalman Filtering statistical theory-based approach. Extensive empirical studies are conducted on three benchmark STG forecasting datasets, demonstrating the performance superiority and computational efficiency of STG-Mamba. It not only surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of STG forecasting performance, but also effectively alleviate the computational bottleneck of large-scale graph networks in reducing the computational cost of FLOPs and test inference time. The implementation code is available at: \url{https://github.com/LincanLi98/STG-Mamba}.
ST-Mamba: Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space Model for Traffic Flow Prediction
Shao, Zhiqi, Bell, Michael G. H., Wang, Ze, Geers, D. Glenn, Xi, Haoning, Gao, Junbin
Traffic flow prediction, a critical aspect of intelligent transportation systems, has been increasingly popular in the field of artificial intelligence, driven by the availability of extensive traffic data. The current challenges of traffic flow prediction lie in integrating diverse factors while balancing the trade-off between computational complexity and the precision necessary for effective long-range and large-scale predictions. To address these challenges, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space (ST-Mamba) model, which is the first to leverage the power of spatial-temporal learning in traffic flow prediction without using graph modeling. The ST-Mamba model can effectively capture the long-range dependency for traffic flow data, thereby avoiding the issue of over-smoothing. The proposed ST-Mamba model incorporates an effective Spatial-Temporal Mixer (ST-Mixer) to seamlessly integrate spatial and temporal data processing into a unified framework and employs a Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space (ST-SSM) block to improve computational efficiency. The proposed ST-Mamba model, specifically designed for spatial-temporal data, simplifies processing procedure and enhances generalization capabilities, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of long-range traffic flow prediction. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, the proposed ST-Mamba model achieves a 61.11\% improvement in computational speed and increases prediction accuracy by 0.67\%. Extensive experiments with real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that the \textsf{ST-Mamba} model sets a new benchmark in traffic flow prediction, achieving SOTA performance in computational efficiency for both long- and short-range predictions and significantly improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of traffic management.
Decoding Geometric Properties in Non-Random Data from First Information-Theoretic Principles
Zenil, Hector, Abrahรฃo, Felipe S.
Based on the principles of information theory, measure theory, and theoretical computer science, we introduce a univariate signal deconvolution method with a wide range of applications to coding theory, particularly in zero-knowledge one-way communication channels, such as in deciphering messages from unknown generating sources about which no prior knowledge is available and to which no return message can be sent. Our multidimensional space reconstruction method from an arbitrary received signal is proven to be agnostic vis-a-vis the encoding-decoding scheme, computation model, programming language, formal theory, the computable (or semi-computable) method of approximation to algorithmic complexity, and any arbitrarily chosen (computable) probability measure of the events. The method derives from the principles of an approach to Artificial General Intelligence capable of building a general-purpose model of models independent of any arbitrarily assumed prior probability distribution. We argue that this optimal and universal method of decoding non-random data has applications to signal processing, causal deconvolution, topological and geometric properties encoding, cryptography, and bio- and technosignature detection.
Information Cascade Prediction under Public Emergencies: A Survey
Zhang, Qi, Wang, Guang, Lin, Li, Xia, Kaiwen, Wang, Shuai
These emergencies are unexpected events that occur suddenly and result in or have the potential to result in significant casualties, property damage, ecological harm, and serious social consequences [147]. Throughout history, natural disasters (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms, floods, avalanches, droughts, and wildfires) and accident disasters (including environmental disasters, traffic accidents, explosions, and gas leaks) have caused numerous fatalities, infrastructure damage, and extensive economic loss. According to the Emergencies Database (EM-DAT), between 2000 and 2023, 5,922 public emergencies occurred, leading to 480,000 casualties and 3.5 trillion in economic losses, as shown in Figure 1 [1]. Therefore, it is increasingly vital to use data, information, and various models to predict potential public emergencies that jeopardize public safety and well-being. Predicting the cascade of information in the event deduction process under public emergencies assists governments, organizations, and individuals in taking proactive measures to mitigate the impact of emergencies and minimize damage. Public emergencies are classified into different categories. The most common categories of public emergencies include (1) Natural disasters, (2) Accident disasters.
A Survey of Generative Techniques for Spatial-Temporal Data Mining
Zhang, Qianru, Wang, Haixin, Long, Cheng, Su, Liangcai, He, Xingwei, Chang, Jianlong, Wu, Tailin, Yin, Hongzhi, Yiu, Siu-Ming, Tian, Qi, Jensen, Christian S.
This paper focuses on the integration of generative techniques into spatial-temporal data mining, considering the significant growth and diverse nature of spatial-temporal data. With the advancements in RNNs, CNNs, and other non-generative techniques, researchers have explored their application in capturing temporal and spatial dependencies within spatial-temporal data. However, the emergence of generative techniques such as LLMs, SSL, Seq2Seq and diffusion models has opened up new possibilities for enhancing spatial-temporal data mining further. The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of generative technique-based spatial-temporal methods and introduces a standardized framework specifically designed for the spatial-temporal data mining pipeline. By offering a detailed review and a novel taxonomy of spatial-temporal methodology utilizing generative techniques, the paper enables a deeper understanding of the various techniques employed in this field. Furthermore, the paper highlights promising future research directions, urging researchers to delve deeper into spatial-temporal data mining. It emphasizes the need to explore untapped opportunities and push the boundaries of knowledge to unlock new insights and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of spatial-temporal data mining. By integrating generative techniques and providing a standardized framework, the paper contributes to advancing the field and encourages researchers to explore the vast potential of generative techniques in spatial-temporal data mining.
Geospatial Knowledge Graphs
Geospatial knowledge graphs have emerged as a novel paradigm for representing and reasoning over geospatial information. In this framework, entities such as places, people, events, and observations are depicted as nodes, while their relationships are represented as edges. This graph-based data format lays the foundation for creating a "FAIR" (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) environment, facilitating the management and analysis of geographic information. This entry first introduces key concepts in knowledge graphs along with their associated standardization and tools. It then delves into the application of knowledge graphs in geography and environmental sciences, emphasizing their role in bridging symbolic and subsymbolic GeoAI to address cross-disciplinary geospatial challenges. At the end, new research directions related to geospatial knowledge graphs are outlined.
Scene Action Maps: Behavioural Maps for Navigation without Metric Information
Humans are remarkable in their ability to navigate without metric information. We can read abstract 2D maps, such as floor-plans or hand-drawn sketches, and use them to navigate in unseen rich 3D environments, without requiring prior traversals to map out these scenes in detail. We posit that this is enabled by the ability to represent the environment abstractly as interconnected navigational behaviours, e.g., "follow the corridor" or "turn right", while avoiding detailed, accurate spatial information at the metric level. We introduce the Scene Action Map (SAM), a behavioural topological graph, and propose a learnable map-reading method, which parses a variety of 2D maps into SAMs. Map-reading extracts salient information about navigational behaviours from the overlooked wealth of pre-existing, abstract and inaccurate maps, ranging from floor-plans to sketches. We evaluate the performance of SAMs for navigation, by building and deploying a behavioural navigation stack on a quadrupedal robot. Videos and more information is available at: https://scene-action-maps.github.io.
Boosting House Price Estimations with Multi-Head Gated Attention
Sellam, Zakaria Abdellah, Distante, Cosimo, Taleb-Ahmed, Abdelmalik, Mazzeo, Pier Luigi
Evaluating house prices is crucial for various stakeholders, including homeowners, investors, and policymakers. However, traditional spatial interpolation methods have limitations in capturing the complex spatial relationships that affect property values. To address these challenges, we have developed a new method called Multi-Head Gated Attention for spatial interpolation. Our approach builds upon attention-based interpolation models and incorporates multiple attention heads and gating mechanisms to capture spatial dependencies and contextual information better. Importantly, our model produces embeddings that reduce the dimensionality of the data, enabling simpler models like linear regression to outperform complex ensembling models. We conducted extensive experiments to compare our model with baseline methods and the original attention-based interpolation model. The results show a significant improvement in the accuracy of house price predictions, validating the effectiveness of our approach. This research advances the field of spatial interpolation and provides a robust tool for more precise house price evaluation. Our GitHub repository.contains the data and code for all datasets, which are available for researchers and practitioners interested in replicating or building upon our work.