AutoFed: Manual-Free Federated Traffic Prediction via Personalized Prompt

Accurate traffic prediction is essential for Intelligent Transportation Systems, including ride-hailing, urban road planning, and vehicle fleet management. However, due to significant privacy concerns surrounding traffic data, most existing methods rely on local training, resulting in data silos and limited knowledge sharing. Federated Learning (FL) offers an efficient solution through privacy-preserving collaborative training; however, standard FL struggles with the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) problem among clients. This challenge has led to the emergence of Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) as a promising paradigm. Nevertheless, current PFL frameworks require further adaptation for traffic prediction tasks, such as specialized graph feature engineering, data processing, and network architecture design. A notable limitation of many prior studies is their reliance on hyper-parameter optimization across datasets-information that is often unavailable in real-world scenarios-thus impeding practical deployment. To address this challenge, we propose AutoFed, a novel PFL framework for traffic prediction that eliminates the need for manual hyper-parameter tuning. Inspired by prompt learning, AutoFed introduces a federated representor that employs a client-aligned adapter to distill local data into a compact, globally shared prompt matrix. This prompt then conditions a personalized predictor, allowing each client to benefit from cross-client knowledge while maintaining local specificity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that AutoFed consistently achieves superior performance across diverse scenarios. The code of this paper is provided at https://github.com/RS2002/AutoFed .

The Impact of LLMs on Online News Consumption and Production

Large language models (LLMs) change how consumers acquire information online; their bots also crawl news publishers' websites for training data and to answer consumer queries; and they provide tools that can lower the cost of content creation. These changes lead to predictions of adverse impact on news publishers in the form of lowered consumer demand, reduced demand for newsroom employees, and an increase in news "slop." Consequently, some publishers strategically responded by blocking LLM access to their websites using the robots.txt file standard. Using high-frequency granular data, we document four effects related to the predicted shifts in news publishing following the introduction of generative AI (GenAI). First, we find a consistent and moderate decline in traffic to news publishers occurring after August 2024. Second, using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that blocking GenAI bots can have adverse effects on large publishers by reducing total website traffic by 23% and real consumer traffic by 14% compared to not blocking. Third, on the hiring side, we do not find evidence that LLMs are replacing editorial or content-production jobs yet. The share of new editorial and content-production job listings increases over time. Fourth, regarding content production, we find no evidence that large publishers increased text volume; instead, they significantly increased rich content and use more advertising and targeting technologies. Together, these findings provide early evidence of some unforeseen impacts of the introduction of LLMs on news production and consumption.

MaRCA: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Computation Allocation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Modern recommender systems face significant computational challenges due to growing model complexity and traffic scale, making efficient computation allocation critical for maximizing business revenue. Existing approaches typically simplify multi-stage computation resource allocation, neglecting inter-stage dependencies, thus limiting global optimality. In this paper, we propose MaRCA, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for end-to-end computation resource allocation in large-scale recommender systems. MaRCA models the stages of a recommender system as cooperative agents, using Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) to optimize revenue under computation resource constraints. We introduce an AutoBucket TestBench for accurate computation cost estimation, and a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Revenue-Cost Balancer to proactively forecast traffic loads and adjust the revenue-cost trade-off accordingly. Since its end-to-end deployment in the advertising pipeline of a leading global e-commerce platform in November 2024, MaRCA has consistently handled hundreds of billions of ad requests per day and has delivered a 16.67% revenue uplift using existing computation resources.

Multi-Scenario Highway Lane-Change Intention Prediction: A Temporal Physics-Informed Multi-Modal Framework

Lane-change intention prediction is safety-critical for autonomous driving and ADAS, but remains difficult in naturalistic traffic due to noisy kinematics, severe class imbalance, and limited generalization across heterogeneous highway scenarios. We propose Temporal Physics-Informed AI (TPI-AI), a hybrid framework that fuses deep temporal representations with physics-inspired interaction cues. A two-layer bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) encoder learns compact embeddings from multi-step trajectory histories; we concatenate these embeddings with kinematics-, safety-, and interaction-aware features (e.g., headway, TTC, and safe-gap indicators) and train a LightGBM classifier for three-class intention recognition (No-LC, Left-LC, Right-LC). To improve minority-class reliability, we apply imbalance-aware optimization including resampling/weighting and fold-wise threshold calibration. Experiments on two large-scale drone-based datasets, highD (straight highways) and exiD (ramp-rich environments), use location-based splits and evaluate prediction horizons T = 1, 2, 3 s. TPI-AI outperforms standalone LightGBM and Bi-LSTM baselines, achieving macro-F1 of 0.9562, 0.9124, 0.8345 on highD and 0.9247, 0.8197, 0.7605 on exiD at T = 1, 2, 3 s, respectively. These results show that combining physics-informed interaction features with learned temporal embeddings yields robust multi-scenario lane-change intention prediction.

Statistical and Machine Learning Analysis of Traffic Accidents on US 158 in Currituck County: A Comparison with HSM Predictions

This study extends previous hotspot and Chi-Square analysis by Sawyer \cite{sawyer2025hotspot} by integrating advanced statistical analysis, machine learning, and spatial modeling techniques to analyze five years (2019--2023) of traffic accident data from an 8.4-mile stretch of US 158 in Currituck County, NC. Building upon foundational statistical work, we apply Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), Negative Binomial Regression, Random Forest classification, and Highway Safety Manual (HSM) Safety Performance Function (SPF) comparisons to identify comprehensive temporal and spatial crash patterns. A Random Forest classifier predicts injury severity with 67\% accuracy, outperforming HSM SPF. Spatial clustering is confirmed via Moran's I test ($I = 0.32$, $p < 0.001$), and KDE analysis reveals hotspots near major intersections, validating and extending earlier hotspot identification methods. These results support targeted interventions to improve traffic safety on this vital transportation corridor. Our objective is to provide actionable insights for improving safety on US 158 while contributing to the broader understanding of rural highway safety analysis through methodological advancement beyond basic statistical techniques.

RIPCN: A Road Impedance Principal Component Network for Probabilistic Traffic Flow Forecasting

Accurate traffic flow forecasting is crucial for intelligent transportation services such as navigation and ride-hailing. In such applications, uncertainty estimation in forecasting is important because it helps evaluate traffic risk levels, assess forecast reliability, and provide timely warnings. As a result, probabilistic traffic flow forecasting (PTFF) has gained significant attention, as it produces both point forecasts and uncertainty estimates. However, existing PTFF approaches still face two key challenges: (1) how to uncover and model the causes of traffic flow uncertainty for reliable forecasting, and (2) how to capture the spatiotemporal correlations of uncertainty for accurate prediction. To address these challenges, we propose RIPCN, a Road Impedance Principal Component Network that integrates domain-specific transportation theory with spatiotemporal principal component learning for PTFF. RIPCN introduces a dynamic impedance evolution network that captures directional traffic transfer patterns driven by road congestion level and flow variability, revealing the direct causes of uncertainty and enhancing both reliability and interpretability. In addition, a principal component network is designed to forecast the dominant eigenvectors of future flow covariance, enabling the model to capture spatiotemporal uncertainty correlations. This design allows for accurate and efficient uncertainty estimation while also improving point prediction performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms existing probabilistic forecasting methods.

Wireless Traffic Prediction with Large Language Model

The growing demand for intelligent, adaptive resource management in next-generation wireless networks has underscored the importance of accurate and scalable wireless traffic prediction. While recent advancements in deep learning and foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising forecasting capabilities, they largely overlook the spatial dependencies inherent in city-scale traffic dynamics. In this paper, we propose TIDES (Traffic Intelligence with DeepSeek-Enhanced Spatial-temporal prediction), a novel LLM-based framework that captures spatial-temporal correlations for urban wireless traffic prediction. TIDES first identifies heterogeneous traffic patterns across regions through a clustering mechanism and trains personalized models for each region to balance generalization and specialization. To bridge the domain gap between numerical traffic data and language-based models, we introduce a prompt engineering scheme that embeds statistical traffic features as structured inputs. Furthermore, we design a DeepSeek module that enables spatial alignment via cross-domain attention, allowing the LLM to leverage information from spatially related regions. By fine-tuning only lightweight components while freezing core LLM layers, TIDES achieves efficient adaptation to domain-specific patterns without incurring excessive training overhead. Extensive experiments on real-world cellular traffic datasets demonstrate that TIDES significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both prediction accuracy and robustness. Our results indicate that integrating spatial awareness into LLM-based predictors is the key to unlocking scalable and intelligent network management in future 6G systems.

Adaptive Graph Pruning with Sudden-Events Evaluation for Traffic Prediction using Online Semi-Decentralized ST-GNNs

Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (ST-GNNs) are well-suited for processing high-frequency data streams from geographically distributed sensors in smart mobility systems. However, their deployment at the edge across distributed compute nodes (cloudlets) createssubstantial communication overhead due to repeated transmission of overlapping node features between neighbouring cloudlets. To address this, we propose an adaptive pruning algorithm that dynamically filters redundant neighbour features while preserving the most informative spatial context for prediction. The algorithm adjusts pruning rates based on recent model performance, allowing each cloudlet to focus on regions experiencing traffic changes without compromising accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Sudden Event Prediction Accuracy (SEPA), a novel event-focused metric designed to measure responsiveness to traffic slowdowns and recoveries, which are often missed by standard error metrics. We evaluate our approach in an online semi-decentralized setting with traditional FL, server-free FL, and Gossip Learning on two large-scale traffic datasets, PeMS-BAY and PeMSD7-M, across short-, mid-, and long-term prediction horizons. Experiments show that, in contrast to standard metrics, SEPA exposes the true value of spatial connectivity in predicting dynamic and irregular traffic. Our adaptive pruning algorithm maintains prediction accuracy while significantly lowering communication cost in all online semi-decentralized settings, demonstrating that communication can be reduced without compromising responsiveness to critical traffic events.

SparScene: Efficient Traffic Scene Representation via Sparse Graph Learning for Large-Scale Trajectory Generation

Multi-agent trajectory generation is a core problem for autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. However, efficiently modeling the dynamic interactions between numerous road users and infrastructures in complex scenes remains an open problem. Existing methods typically employ distance-based or fully connected dense graph structures to capture interaction information, which not only introduces a large number of redundant edges but also requires complex and heavily parameterized networks for encoding, thereby resulting in low training and inference efficiency, limiting scalability to large and complex traffic scenes. To overcome the limitations of existing methods, we propose SparScene, a sparse graph learning framework designed for efficient and scalable traffic scene representation. Instead of relying on distance thresholds, SparScene leverages the lane graph topology to construct structure-aware sparse connections between agents and lanes, enabling efficient yet informative scene graph representation. SparScene adopts a lightweight graph encoder that efficiently aggregates agent-map and agent-agent interactions, yielding compact scene representations with substantially improved efficiency and scalability. On the motion prediction benchmark of the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD), SparScene achieves competitive performance with remarkable efficiency. It generates trajectories for more than 200 agents in a scene within 5 ms and scales to more than 5,000 agents and 17,000 lanes with merely 54 ms of inference time with a GPU memory of 2.9 GB, highlighting its superior scalability for large-scale traffic scenes.

Evasion-Resilient Detection of DNS-over-HTTPS Data Exfiltration: A Practical Evaluation and Toolkit

The purpose of this project is to assess how well defenders can detect DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) file exfiltration, and which evasion strategies can be used by attackers. While providing a reproducible toolkit to generate, intercept and analyze DoH exfiltration, and comparing Machine Learning vs threshold-based detection under adversarial scenarios. The originality of this project is the introduction of an end-to-end, containerized pipeline that generates configurable file exfiltration over DoH using several parameters (e.g., chunking, encoding, padding, resolver rotation). It allows for file reconstruction at the resolver side, while extracting flow-level features using a fork of DoHLyzer. The pipeline contains a prediction side, which allows the training of machine learning models based on public labelled datasets and then evaluates them side-by-side with threshold-based detection methods against malicious and evasive DNS-Over-HTTPS traffic. We train Random Forest, Gradient Boosting and Logistic Regression classifiers on a public DoH dataset and benchmark them against evasive DoH exfiltration scenarios. The toolkit orchestrates traffic generation, file capture, feature extraction, model training and analysis. The toolkit is then encapsulated into several Docker containers for easy setup and full reproducibility regardless of the platform it is run on. Future research regarding this project is directed at validating the results on mixed enterprise traffic, extending the protocol coverage to HTTP/3/QUIC request, adding a benign traffic generation, and working on real-time traffic evaluation. A key objective is to quantify when stealth constraints make DoH exfiltration uneconomical and unworthy for the attacker.