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Given an urban development plan and the historical traffic observations over the road network, the Conditional Urban Traffic Estimation problem aims to estimate the resulting traffic status prior to the deployment of the plan. This problem is of great importance to urban development and transportation management, yet is very challenging because the plan would change the local travel demands drastically and the new travel demand pattern might be unprecedented in the historical data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Conditional Urban Traffic Generative Adversarial Network (Curb-GAN), which provides traffic estimations in consecutive time slots based on different (unprecedented) travel demands, thus enables urban planners to accurately evaluate urban plans before deploying them. The proposed Curb-GAN adopts and advances the conditional GAN structure through a few novel ideas: (1) dealing with various travel demands as the "conditions" and generating corresponding traffic estimations, (2) integrating dynamic convolutional layers to capture the local spatial auto-correlations along the underlying road networks, (3) employing self-attention mechanism to capture the temporal dependencies of the traffic across different time slots. Extensive experiments on two real-world spatio-temporal datasets demonstrate that our Curb-GAN outperforms major baseline methods in estimation accuracy under various conditions and can produce more meaningful estimations.
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This content will become publicly available on February 28, 2026
C3-GAN+: Complex-Condition-Controlled Generative Adversarial Networks with Enhanced Embedding
Given historical traffic distributions and associated urban conditions observed in a city, the conditional urban traffic estimation problem aims at estimating realistic future projections of the traffic under a set of new urban conditions, e.g., new bus routes, rainfall intensity, and travel demands. The problem is important in reducing traffic congestion, improving public transportation efficiency, and facilitating urban planning. However, solving this problem is challenging due to the strong spatial dependencies of traffic patterns and the complex relations between the traffic and urban conditions. Recently, we proposed a Complex-Condition-Controlled Generative Adversarial Network C3-GAN, which tackles both of the challenges and solves the urban traffic estimation problem under various complex conditions by adding a fixed embedding network and an inference network on top of the standard conditional GAN model. The randomly chosen embedding network transforms the complex conditions to latent vectors, and the inference network enhances the connections between the embedded vectors and the traffic data. However, a randomly chosen embedding network cannot always successfully extract features of complex urban conditions, which indicates C3-GAN is unable to uniquely map different urban conditions to proper latent distributions. Thus, C3-GAN would fail in certain traffic estimation tasks. Besides, C3-GAN is hard to train due to vanishing gradients and mode collapse problems. To address these issues, in this article, we extend our prior work by introducing a new deep generative model, namely, C3-GAN+, which significantly improves the estimation performance and model stability. C3-GAN+ has new objective, architecture, and training algorithm. The new objective applies Wasserstein loss to the conditional generation case to encourage stable training. Shared convolutional layers between the discriminator and the inference network help to capture spatial dependencies of traffic more efficiently, part of the shared convolutional layers are used to update the embedding network periodically aiming to encourage good representation and avoid model divergence. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our C3-GAN+ produces high-quality traffic estimations and outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1942680
- PAR ID:
- 10611493
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1556-4681
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 21
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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