Unlocking air traffic flow prediction through microscopic aircraft-state modeling

Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series, despite traffic dynamics being governed by aircraft states and interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control intent. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling framework that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density without relying on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense consistently improves predictive accuracy over aggregation-based forecasting approaches, particularly during high-density traffic periods. These findings suggest that instantaneous airspace situations provide an effective alternative to conventional time-series-based traffic forecasting paradigms.

From Time Series to State: Situation-Aware Modeling for Air Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate air traffic prediction in the terminal airspace (TA) is pivotal for proactive air traffic management (ATM). However, existing data-driven approaches predominantly rely on time series-based forecasting paradigms, which inherently overlook critical aircraft state information, such as real-time kinematics and proximity to airspace boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{AeroSense}, a direct state-to-flow modeling framework for air traffic prediction. Unlike classical time series-based methods that first aggregate aircraft trajectories into macroscopic flow sequences before modeling, AeroSense explicitly represents the real-time airspace situation as \textit{a dynamic set of aircraft states}, enabling the direct processing of a variable number of aircraft instead of time series as inputs. Specifically, we introduce a situation-aware state representation that enables AeroSense to sense the instantaneous terminal airspace situation directly from microscopic aircraft states. Furthermore, we design a model architecture that incorporates masked self-attention to capture inter-aircraft interactions, together with two decoupled prediction heads to model heterogeneous flow dynamics across two key functional areas of the TA. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world airport dataset demonstrate that AeroSense consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating that direct modeling of microscopic aircraft states yields substantially higher predictive fidelity than time series-based baselines. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits superior robustness during peak traffic periods, achieves Pareto-optimal performance under dayparting multi-object evaluation, and provides meaningful interpretability through attention-based visualizations.

Towards Situation-aware State Modeling for Air Traffic Flow Prediction

Accurate air traffic prediction in the terminal airspace (TA) is pivotal for proactive air traffic management (ATM). However, existing data-driven approaches predominantly rely on time series-based forecasting paradigms, which inherently overlook critical aircraft state information, such as real-time kinematics and proximity to airspace boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{AeroSense}, a direct state-to-flow modeling framework for air traffic prediction. Unlike classical time series-based methods that first aggregate aircraft trajectories into macroscopic flow sequences before modeling, AeroSense explicitly represents the real-time airspace situation as \textit{a dynamic set of aircraft states}, enabling the direct processing of a variable number of aircraft instead of time series as inputs. Specifically, we introduce a situation-aware state representation that enables AeroSense to sense the instantaneous terminal airspace situation directly from microscopic aircraft states. Furthermore, we design a model architecture that incorporates masked self-attention to capture inter-aircraft interactions, together with two decoupled prediction heads to model heterogeneous flow dynamics across two key functional areas of the TA. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world airport dataset demonstrate that AeroSense consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating that direct modeling of microscopic aircraft states yields substantially higher predictive fidelity than time series-based baselines. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits superior robustness during peak traffic periods, achieves Pareto-optimal performance under dayparting multi-object evaluation, and provides meaningful interpretability through attention-based visualizations.

Downstream Task Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement: A Perception-Aware Study from Dataset Construction to Network Design

In real underwater environments, downstream image recognition tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection often face challenges posed by problems like blurring and color inconsistencies. Underwater image enhancement (UIE) has emerged as a promising preprocessing approach, aiming to improve the recognizability of targets in underwater images. However, most existing UIE methods mainly focus on enhancing images for human visual perception, frequently failing to reconstruct high-frequency details that are critical for task-specific recognition. To address this issue, we propose a Downstream Task-Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement (DTI-UIE) framework, which leverages human visual perception model to enhance images effectively for underwater vision tasks. Specifically, we design an efficient two-branch network with task-aware attention module for feature mixing. The network benefits from a multi-stage training framework and a task-driven perceptual loss. Additionally, inspired by human perception, we automatically construct a Task-Inspired UIE Dataset (TI-UIED) using various task-specific networks. Experimental results demonstrate that DTI-UIE significantly improves task performance by generating preprocessed images that are beneficial for downstream tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/DTIUIE.

Enhancing Underwater Images via Adaptive Semantic-aware Codebook Learning

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is an ill-posed problem where natural clean references are not available, and the degradation levels vary significantly across semantic regions. Existing UIE methods treat images with a single global model and ignore the inconsistent degradation of different scene components. This oversight leads to significant color distortions and loss of fine details in heterogeneous underwater scenes, especially where degradation varies significantly across different image regions. Therefore, we propose SUCode (Semantic-aware Underwater Codebook Network), which achieves adaptive UIE from semantic-aware discrete codebook representation. Compared with one-shot codebook-based methods, SUCode exploits semantic-aware, pixel-level codebook representation tailored to heterogeneous underwater degradation. A three-stage training paradigm is employed to represent raw underwater image features to avoid pseudo ground-truth contamination. Gated Channel Attention Module (GCAM) and Frequency-Aware Feature Fusion (FAFF) jointly integrate channel and frequency cues for faithful color restoration and texture recovery. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SUCode achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming recent UIE methods on both reference and no-reference metrics. The code will be made public available at https://github.com/oucailab/SUCode.

ShapeCond: Fast Shapelet-Guided Dataset Condensation for Time Series Classification

Time series data supports many domains (e.g., finance and climate science), but its rapid growth strains storage and computation. Dataset condensation can alleviate this by synthesizing a compact training set that preserves key information. Yet most condensation methods are image-centric and often fail on time series because they miss time-series-specific temporal structure, especially local discriminative motifs such as shapelets. In this work, we propose ShapeCond, a novel and efficient condensation framework for time series classification that leverages shapelet-based dataset knowledge via a shapelet-guided optimization strategy. Our shapelet-assisted synthesis cost is independent of sequence length: longer series yield larger speedups in synthesis (e.g., 29$\times$ faster over prior state-of-the-art method CondTSC for time-series condensation, and up to 10,000$\times$ over naively using shapelets on the Sleep dataset with 3,000 timesteps). By explicitly preserving critical local patterns, ShapeCond improves downstream accuracy and consistently outperforms all prior state-of-the-art time series dataset condensation methods across extensive experiments. Code is available at https://github.com/lunaaa95/ShapeCond.

Weighted Graph Clustering via Scale Contraction and Graph Structure Learning

Graph clustering aims to partition nodes into distinct clusters based on their similarity, thereby revealing relationships among nodes. Nevertheless, most existing methods do not fully utilize these edge weights. Leveraging edge weights in graph clustering tasks faces two critical challenges. (1) The introduction of edge weights may significantly increase storage space and training time, making it essential to reduce the graph scale while preserving nodes that are beneficial for the clustering task. (2) Edge weight information may inherently contain noise that negatively impacts clustering results. However, few studies can jointly optimize clustering and edge weights, which is crucial for mitigating the negative impact of noisy edges on clustering task. To address these challenges, we propose a contractile edge-weight-aware graph clustering network. Specifically, a cluster-oriented graph contraction module is designed to reduce the graph scale while preserving important nodes. An edge-weight-aware attention network is designed to identify and weaken noisy connections. In this way, we can more easily identify and mitigate the impact of noisy edges during the clustering process, thus enhancing clustering effectiveness. We conducted extensive experiments on three real-world weighted graph datasets. In particular, our model outperforms the best baseline, demonstrating its superior performance. Furthermore, experiments also show that the proposed graph contraction module can significantly reduce training time and storage space.

Structure-Aware Automatic Channel Pruning by Searching with Graph Embedding

Channel pruning is a powerful technique to reduce the computational overhead of deep neural networks, enabling efficient deployment on resource-constrained devices. However, existing pruning methods often rely on local heuristics or weight-based criteria that fail to capture global structural dependencies within the network, leading to suboptimal pruning decisions and degraded model performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel structure-aware automatic channel pruning (SACP) framework that utilizes graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to model the network topology and learn the global importance of each channel. By encoding structural relationships within the network, our approach implements topology-aware pruning and this pruning is fully automated, reducing the need for human intervention. We restrict the pruning rate combinations to a specific space, where the number of combinations can be dynamically adjusted, and use a search-based approach to determine the optimal pruning rate combinations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (CIFAR-10, ImageNet) with various models (ResNet, VGG16) demonstrate that SACP outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods on compression efficiency and competitive on accuracy retention.

ScaleGNN: Towards Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive High-order Neighboring Feature Fusion

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance across various graph-based tasks by effectively capturing relational information between nodes. These models rely on iterative message passing to propagate node features, enabling nodes to aggregate information from their neighbors. Recent research has significantly improved the message-passing mechanism, enhancing GNN scalability on large-scale graphs. However, GNNs still face two main challenges: over-smoothing, where excessive message passing results in indistinguishable node representations, especially in deep networks incorporating high-order neighbors; and scalability issues, as traditional architectures suffer from high model complexity and increased inference time due to redundant information aggregation. This paper proposes a novel framework for large-scale graphs named ScaleGNN that simultaneously addresses both challenges by adaptively fusing multi-level graph features. We first construct neighbor matrices for each order, learning their relative information through trainable weights through an adaptive high-order feature fusion module. This allows the model to selectively emphasize informative high-order neighbors while reducing unnecessary computational costs. Additionally, we introduce a High-order redundant feature masking mechanism based on a Local Contribution Score (LCS), which enables the model to retain only the most relevant neighbors at each order, preventing redundant information propagation. Furthermore, low-order enhanced feature aggregation adaptively integrates low-order and high-order features based on task relevance, ensuring effective capture of both local and global structural information without excessive complexity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNN models in both accuracy and computational efficiency.

Efficient Discovery of Motif Transition Process for Large-Scale Temporal Graphs

Understanding the dynamic transition of motifs in temporal graphs is essential for revealing how graph structures evolve over time, identifying critical patterns, and predicting future behaviors, yet existing methods often focus on predefined motifs, limiting their ability to comprehensively capture transitions and interrelationships. We propose a parallel motif transition process discovery algorithm, PTMT, a novel parallel method for discovering motif transition processes in large-scale temporal graphs. PTMT integrates a tree-based framework with the temporal zone partitioning (TZP) strategy, which partitions temporal graphs by time and structure while preserving lossless motif transitions and enabling massive parallelism. PTMT comprises three phases: growth zone parallel expansion, overlap-aware result aggregation, and deterministic encoding of motif transitions, ensuring accurate tracking of dynamic transitions and interactions. Results on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that PTMT achieves speedups ranging from 12.0$\times$ to 50.3$\times$ compared to the SOTA method.