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Agentic Vehicles for Human-Centered Mobility
Autonomy, from the Greek autos (self) and nomos (law), refers to the capacity to operate according to internal rules without external control. Autonomous vehicles (AuVs) are therefore understood as systems that perceive their environment and execute pre-programmed tasks independently of external input, consistent with the SAE levels of automated driving. Yet recent research and real-world deployments have begun to showcase vehicles that exhibit behaviors outside the scope of this definition. These include natural language interaction with humans, goal adaptation, contextual reasoning, external tool use, and the handling of unforeseen ethical dilemmas, enabled in part by multimodal large language models (LLMs). These developments highlight not only a gap between technical autonomy and the broader cognitive and social capacities required for human-centered mobility, but also the emergence of a form of vehicle intelligence that currently lacks a clear designation. To address this gap, the paper introduces the concept of agentic vehicles (AgVs): vehicles that integrate agentic AI systems to reason, adapt, and interact within complex environments. It synthesizes recent advances in agentic systems and suggests how AgVs can complement and even reshape conventional autonomy to ensure mobility services are aligned with user and societal needs. The paper concludes by outlining key challenges in the development and governance of AgVs and their potential role in shaping future agentic transportation systems.
Predicting Driver's Perceived Risk: a Model Based on Semi-Supervised Learning Strategy
Huang, Siwei, Yang, Chenhao, Hu, Chuan
Drivers' perception of risk determines their acceptance, trust, and use of the Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). However, perceived risk is subjective and difficult to evaluate using existing methods. To address this issue, a driver's subjective perceived risk (DSPR) model is proposed, regarding perceived risk as a dynamically triggered mechanism with anisotropy and attenuation. 20 participants are recruited for a driver-in-the-loop experiment to report their real-time subjective risk ratings (SRRs) when experiencing various automatic driving scenarios. A convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network with temporal pattern attention (CNN-Bi-LSTM-TPA) is embedded into a semi-supervised learning strategy to predict SRRs, aiming to reduce data noise caused by subjective randomness of participants. The results illustrate that DSPR achieves the highest prediction accuracy of 87.91% in predicting SRRs, compared to three state-of-the-art risk models. The semi-supervised strategy improves accuracy by 20.12%. Besides, CNN-Bi-LSTM-TPA network presents the highest accuracy among four different LSTM structures. This study offers an effective method for assessing driver's perceived risk, providing support for the safety enhancement of ADS and driver's trust improvement.
Parking Availability Prediction via Fusing Multi-Source Data with A Self-Supervised Learning Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Inverted Transformer
Huang, Yin, Dong, Yongqi, Tang, Youhua, Li, Li
The rapid growth of private car ownership has worsened the urban parking predicament, underscoring the need for accurate and effective parking availability prediction to support urban planning and management. To address key limitations in modeling spatio-temporal dependencies and exploiting multi-source data for parking availability prediction, this study proposes a novel approach with SST-iTransformer. The methodology leverages K-means clustering to establish parking cluster zones (PCZs), extracting and integrating traffic demand characteristics from various transportation modes (i.e., metro, bus, online ride-hailing, and taxi) associated with the targeted parking lots. Upgraded on vanilla iTransformer, SST-iTransformer integrates masking-reconstruction-based pretext tasks for self-supervised spatio-temporal representation learning, and features an innovative dual-branch attention mechanism: Series Attention captures long-term temporal dependencies via patching operations, while Channel Attention models cross-variate interactions through inverted dimensions. Extensive experiments using real-world data from Chengdu, China, demonstrate that SST-iTransformer outperforms baseline deep learning models (including Informer, Autoformer, Crossformer, and iTransformer), achieving state-of-the-art performance with the lowest mean squared error (MSE) and competitive mean absolute error (MAE). Comprehensive ablation studies quantitatively reveal the relative importance of different data sources: incorporating ride-hailing data provides the largest performance gains, followed by taxi, whereas fixed-route transit features (bus/metro) contribute marginally. Spatial correlation analysis further confirms that excluding historical data from correlated parking lots within PCZs leads to substantial performance degradation, underscoring the importance of modeling spatial dependencies.
Robust Tensor Completion via Gradient Tensor Nulclear L1-L2 Norm for Traffic Data Recovery
Shu, Hao, Li, Jicheng, Lei, Tianyv, Sun, Lijun
In real-world scenarios, spatiotemporal traffic data frequently experiences dual degradation from missing values and noise caused by sensor malfunctions and communication failures. Therefore, effective data recovery methods are essential to ensure the reliability of downstream data-driven applications. while classical tensor completion methods have been widely adopted, they are incapable of modeling noise, making them unsuitable for complex scenarios involving simultaneous data missingness and noise interference. Existing Robust Tensor Completion (RTC) approaches offer potential solutions by separately modeling the actual tensor data and noise. However, their effectiveness is often constrained by the over-relaxation of convex rank surrogates and the suboptimal utilization of local consistency, leading to inadequate model accuracy. To address these limitations, we first introduce the tensor L1-L2 norm, a novel non-convex tensor rank surrogate that functions as an effective low-rank representation tool. Leveraging an advanced feature fusion strategy, we further develop the gradient tensor L1-L2 norm by incorporating the tensor L1-L2 norm in the gradient domain. By integrating the gradient tensor nuclear L1-L2 norm into the RTC framework, we propose the Robust Tensor Completion via Gradient Tensor Nuclear L1-L2 Norm (RTC-GTNLN) model, which not only fully exploits both global low-rankness and local consistency without trade-off parameter, but also effectively handles the dual degradation challenges of missing data and noise in traffic data. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that the RTC-GTNLN model consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in complex recovery scenarios involving simultaneous missing values and noise.
Public Perceptions of Autonomous Vehicles: A Survey of Pedestrians and Cyclists in Pittsburgh
--This study investigates how autonomous vehicle (A V) technology is perceived by pedestrians and bicyclists in Pittsburgh. Using survey data from over 1200 respondents, the research explores the interplay between demographics, A V interactions, infrastructural readiness, safety perceptions, and trust. Findings highlight demographic divides, infrastructure gaps, and the crucial role of communication and education in A V adoption. Autonomous vehicle (A V) integration into urban settings has sparked serious concerns about how these vehicles may affect vulnerable road users, especially pedestrians and cyclists. It is critical to comprehend the comfort, safety, and views of these road users as autonomous vehicles (A Vs) are tested and used more frequently in places like Pittsburgh. Sharing the road with autonomous vehicles poses special risks for pedestrians and cyclists because of their exposure and lack of physical protection. Among these issues are worries regarding A Vs' capacity to recognize and react to their motions, especially in situations with a lot of traffic or unpredictability. Furthermore, concerns and discomfort may be exacerbated by the inadequacy of the current urban infrastructure to facilitate the safe coexistence of A Vs and non-motorized users.
Enhancing Trust Management System for Connected Autonomous Vehicles Using Machine Learning Methods: A Survey
Xu, Qian, Zhang, Lei, Liu, Yixiao
Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) operate in dynamic, open, and multi-domain networks, rendering them vulnerable to various threats. Trust Management Systems (TMS) systematically organize essential steps in the trust mechanism, identifying malicious nodes against internal threats and external threats, as well as ensuring reliable decision-making for more cooperative tasks. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) offer significant potential to enhance TMS, especially for the strict requirements of CAVs, such as CAV nodes moving at varying speeds, and opportunistic and intermittent network behavior. Those features distinguish ML-based TMS from social networks, static IoT, and Social IoT. This survey proposes a novel three-layer ML-based TMS framework for CAVs in the vehicle-road-cloud integration system, i.e., trust data layer, trust calculation layer and trust incentive layer. A six-dimensional taxonomy of objectives is proposed. Furthermore, the principles of ML methods for each module in each layer are analyzed. Then, recent studies are categorized based on traffic scenarios that are against the proposed objectives. Finally, future directions are suggested, addressing the open issues and meeting the research trend. We maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date literature and open-source projects at https://github.com/octoberzzzzz/ML-based-TMS-CAV-Survey.
A Large Language Model for Feasible and Diverse Population Synthesis
Lim, Sung Yoo, Yun, Hyunsoo, Bansal, Prateek, Kim, Dong-Kyu, Kim, Eui-Jin
Generating a synthetic population that is both feasible and diverse is crucial for ensuring the validity of downstream activity schedul e simulation in activity - based models (ABMs) . While deep generative models (DGMs), such as variational autoencoders and g enerative adversarial networks, have been applied to this task, they often struggle to balance the inclusion of rare but plausible combinations (i.e., sampling zeros) with the exclusion of implausible ones (i.e., structural zeros). To improve feasibility while maintaining diversity, we propose a fine - tuning method for large language models (LLMs) that explicitly controls the autoregressive generation process through topological orderings derived from a Bayesian Network (BN). Experimental result s show that our hybrid LLM - BN approach outperform s both traditional DGMs and proprietary LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT - 4o) with few - shot learning. Specifically, our approach achieves approximately 95% feasibility -- significantly higher than the ~80% observed in DGMs -- w hile maintaining comparable diversity, making it well - suited for practical applications. Importantly, the method is based on a lightweight open - source LLM, enabling fine - tuning and inference on standard personal computing environments. This makes the appro ach cost - effective and scalable for large - scale applications, such as synthesizing populations in megacities, without relying on expensive infrastructure. By initiating the ABM pipeline with high - quality synthetic populations, our method improves overall s imulation reliability and reduces downstream error propagation. The source code for these methods is available for research and practical application.
A Self-Supervised Transformer for Unusable Shared Bike Detection
Huang, Yin, Dong, Yongqi, Tang, Youhua, Hernandez, Alvaro García
The rapid expansion of bike-sharing systems (BSS) has greatly improved urban "last-mile" connectivity, yet large-scale deployments face escalating operational challenges, particularly in detecting faulty bikes. Existing detection approaches either rely on static model-based thresholds that overlook dynamic spatiotemporal (ST) usage patterns or employ supervised learning methods that struggle with label scarcity and class imbalance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel Self-Supervised Transformer (SSTransformer) framework for automatically detecting unusable shared bikes, leveraging ST features extracted from GPS trajectories and trip records. The model incorporates a self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance its feature extraction capabilities, followed by fine-tuning for efficient status recognition. In the pre-training phase, the Transformer encoder learns generalized representations of bike movement via a self-supervised objective; in the fine-tuning phase, the encoder is adapted to a downstream binary classification task. Comprehensive experiments on a real-world dataset of 10,730 bikes (1,870 unusable, 8,860 normal) from Chengdu, China, demonstrate that SSTransformer significantly outperforms traditional machine learning, ensemble learning, and deep learning baselines, achieving the best accuracy (97.81%), precision (0.8889), and F1-score (0.9358). This work highlights the effectiveness of self-supervised Transformer on ST data for capturing complex anomalies in BSS, paving the way toward more reliable and scalable maintenance solutions for shared mobility.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning-Based Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving: Lessons Learned from a Driving Task Perspective
Li, Zhuoren, Jin, Guizhe, Yu, Ran, Chen, Zhiwen, Li, Nan, Han, Wei, Xiong, Lu, Leng, Bo, Hu, Jia, Kolmanovsky, Ilya, Filev, Dimitar
Reinforcement learning (RL), with its ability to explore and optimize policies in complex, dynamic decision-making tasks, has emerged as a promising approach to addressing motion planning (MoP) challenges in autonomous driving (AD). Despite rapid advancements in RL and AD, a systematic description and interpretation of the RL design process tailored to diverse driving tasks remains underdeveloped. This survey provides a comprehensive review of RL-based MoP for AD, focusing on lessons from task-specific perspectives. We first outline the fundamentals of RL methodologies, and then survey their applications in MoP, analyzing scenario-specific features and task requirements to shed light on their influence on RL design choices. Building on this analysis, we summarize key design experiences, extract insights from various driving task applications, and provide guidance for future implementations. Additionally, we examine the frontier challenges in RL-based MoP, review recent efforts to addresse these challenges, and propose strategies for overcoming unresolved issues.
Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: Improving Safety When Driving through Intersection
Leng, Bo, Yu, Ran, Han, Wei, Xiong, Lu, Li, Zhuoren, Huang, Hailong
Applying reinforcement learning to autonomous driving has garnered widespread attention. However, classical reinforcement learning methods optimize policies by maximizing expected rewards but lack sufficient safety considerations, often putting agents in hazardous situations. This paper proposes a risk-aware reinforcement learning approach for autonomous driving to improve the safety performance when crossing the intersection. Safe critics are constructed to evaluate driving risk and work in conjunction with the reward critic to update the actor. Based on this, a Lagrangian relaxation method and cyclic gradient iteration are combined to project actions into a feasible safe region. Furthermore, a Multi-hop and Multi-layer perception (MLP) mixed Attention Mechanism (MMAM) is incorporated into the actor-critic network, enabling the policy to adapt to dynamic traffic and overcome permutation sensitivity challenges. This allows the policy to focus more effectively on surrounding potential risks while enhancing the identification of passing opportunities. Simulation tests are conducted on different tasks at unsignalized intersections. The results show that the proposed approach effectively reduces collision rates and improves crossing efficiency in comparison to baseline algorithms. Additionally, our ablation experiments demonstrate the benefits of incorporating risk-awareness and MMAM into RL.