Zekun Cai

dblp:199/2102 · DBLP profile ↗
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19ranked-venue papers
5as first author
14since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-5773-1395ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 12 · 3 first-author · 8 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 11 · 1 first-author · 9 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 4 · 1 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Continuous Domain Generalization
abstract
Real-world data distributions often shift continuously across multiple latent factors such as time, geography, and socioeconomic contexts. However, existing domain generalization approaches typically treat domains as discrete or as evolving along a single axis (e.g., time). This oversimplification fails to capture the complex, multidimensional nature of real-world variation. This paper introduces the task of Continuous Domain Generalization (CDG), which aims to generalize predictive models to unseen domains defined by arbitrary combinations of continuous variations. We present a principled framework grounded in geometric and algebraic theories, showing that optimal model parameters across domains lie on a low-dimensional manifold. To model this structure, we propose a Neural Lie Transport Operator (NeuralLio), which enables structure-preserving parameter transitions by enforcing geometric continuity and algebraic consistency. To handle noisy or incomplete domain variation descriptors, we introduce a gating mechanism to suppress irrelevant dimensions and a local chart-based strategy for robust generalization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including remote sensing, scientific documents, and traffic forecasting, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines in both generalization accuracy and robustness.
Zekun Cai, Yiheng Yao, Guangji Bai, Renhe Jiang, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Liang Zhao 0002
NeurIPS1
2024 Continuous Temporal Domain Generalization
abstract
Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) addresses the challenge of training predictive models under temporally varying data distributions. Traditional TDG approaches typically focus on domain data collected at fixed, discrete time intervals, which limits their capability to capture the inherent dynamics within continuous-evolving and irregularly-observed temporal domains. To overcome this, this work formalizes the concept of Continuous Temporal Domain Generalization (CTDG), where domain data are derived from continuous times and are collected at arbitrary times. CTDG tackles critical challenges including: 1) Characterizing the continuous dynamics of both data and models, 2) Learning complex high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, and 3) Optimizing and controlling the generalization across continuous temporal domains. To address them, we propose a Koopman operator-driven continuous temporal domain generalization (Koodos) framework. We formulate the problem within a continuous dynamic system and leverage the Koopman theory to learn the underlying dynamics; the framework is further enhanced with a comprehensive optimization strategy equipped with analysis and control driven by prior knowledge of the dynamics patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. The code can be found at: https://github.com/Zekun-Cai/Koodos.
Zekun Cai, Guangji Bai, Renhe Jiang, Xuan Song 0001, Liang Zhao 0002
NeurIPS1
2024 Forecasting Citywide Crowd Transition Process via Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks
abstract
Perceiving and modeling urban crowd movements are of great importance to smart city-related fields. Governments and public service operators can benefit from such efforts as they can be applied to crowd management, resource scheduling, and early emergency warning. However, most prior research on urban crowd modeling has failed to describe the dynamics and continuity of human mobility, leading to inconsistent and irrelevant results when they tackle multiple homogeneous forecasting tasks as they can only be modeled independently. To overcome this drawback, we propose to model human mobility from a new perspective, which uses the citywide crowd transition process constituted by a series of transition matrices from low order to high order, to help us understand how the crowd dynamics evolve step-by-step. We further propose a Deep Transition Process Network to process and predict such new high-dimensional data, where novel grid embedding with Graph Convolutional Network, parameter-shared Convolutional LSTM, and High-Dimensional Attention mechanism are designed to learn the complicated dependencies in terms of spatial, temporal, and ordinal features. We conduct experiments on two datasets generated by a large amount of GPS data collected from a real-world smartphone application. The experiment results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methodology over existing approaches.
Zekun Cai, Renhe Jiang, Xinlei Lian, Chuang Yang 0002, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Zipei Fan, Kota Tsubouchi, Hill Hiroki Kobayashi, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput.1
2023 MemDA: Forecasting Urban Time Series with Memory-based Drift Adaptation
abstract
Urban time series data forecasting featuring significant contributions to sustainable development is widely studied as an essential task of the smart city. However, with the dramatic and rapid changes in the world environment, the assumption that data obey Independent Identically Distribution is undermined by the subsequent changes in data distribution, known as concept drift, leading to weak replicability and transferability of the model over unseen data. To address the issue, previous approaches typically retrain the model, forcing it to fit the most recent observed data. However, retraining is problematic in that it leads to model lag, consumption of resources, and model re-invalidation, causing the drift problem to be not well solved in realistic scenarios. In this study, we propose a new urban time series prediction model for the concept drift problem, which encodes the drift by considering the periodicity in the data and makes on-the-fly adjustments to the model based on the drift using a meta-dynamic network. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our design significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can be well generalized to existing prediction backbones by reducing their sensitivity to distribution changes.
Zekun Cai, Renhe Jiang, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Diansheng Guo, Hill Hiroki Kobayashi, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
CIKM1
2023 Understand Users' Privacy Perception and Decision of V2X Communication in Connected Autonomous Vehicles
Zekun Cai, Aiping Xiong
USENIX Security Symposium1
2023 DeepCrowd: A Deep Model for Large-Scale Citywide Crowd Density and Flow Prediction
abstract
Predicting the density and flow of the crowd or traffic at a citywide level becomes possible by using the big data and cutting-edge AI technologies. It has been a very significant research topic with high social impact, which can be widely applied to emergency management, traffic regulation, and urban planning. In particular, by meshing a large urban area to a number of fine-grained mesh-grids, citywide crowd and traffic information in a continuous time period can be represented with 4D tensor (Timestep, Height, Width, Channel). Based on this idea, a series of methods have been proposed to address grid-based prediction for citywide crowd and traffic. In this study, we revisit the density and in-out flow prediction problem and publish a new aggregated human mobility dataset generated from a real-world smartphone application. Comparing with the existing ones, our dataset holds several advantages including large mesh-grid number, fine-grained mesh size, and high user sample. Towards this large-scale crowd dataset, we propose a novel deep learning model called DeepCrowd by designing pyramid architectures and high-dimensional attention mechanism based on Convolutional LSTM. Lastly, thorough and comprehensive performance evaluations are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DeepCrowd comparing to multiple state-of-the-art methods.
Renhe Jiang, Zekun Cai, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Chuang Yang 0002, Zipei Fan, Quanjun Chen, Kota Tsubouchi, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2
2023 ST-ExpertNet: A Deep Expert Framework for Traffic Prediction
abstract
Recently, forecasting the crowd flows has become an important research topic, and plentiful technologies have achieved good performances. As we all know, the flow at a citywide level is in a mixed state with several basic patterns (e.g., commuting, working, and commercial) caused by the city area functional distributions (e.g., developed commercial areas, educational areas and parks). However, existing technologies have been criticized for their lack of considering the differences in the flow patterns among regions since they want to build only one comprehensive model to learn the mixed flow tensors. Recognizing this limitation, we present a new perspective on flow prediction and propose an explainable framework named ST-ExpertNet, which can adopt every spatial-temporal model and train a set of functional experts devoted to specific flow patterns. Technically, we train a bunch of experts based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE), which guides each expert to specialize in different kinds of flow patterns in sample spaces by using the gating network. We define several criteria, including comprehensiveness, sparsity, and preciseness, to construct the experts for better interpretability and performances. We conduct experiments on a wide range of real-world taxi and bike datasets in Beijing and NYC. The visualizations of the expert's intermediate results demonstrate that our ST-ExpertNet successfully disentangles the city's mixed flow tensors along with the city layout, e.g., the urban ring road structure. Different network architectures, such as ST-ResNet, ConvLSTM, and CNN, have been adopted into our ST-ExpertNet framework for experiments and the results demonstrates the superiority of our framework in both interpretability and performances.
Hongjun Wang 0007, Jiyuan Chen, Zipei Fan, Zhiwen Zhang 0004, Zekun Cai, Xuan Song 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.5
2022 Yahoo! Bousai Crowd Data: A Large-Scale Crowd Density and Flow Dataset in Tokyo and Osaka
abstract
Citywide crowd prediction can be of great importance for emergency management, traffic regulation, and urban planning. By meshing a large urban area to a number of fine-grained mesh-grids as illustrated in Fig. 1 , citywide crowd in a continuous time period can be represented with a four-dimensional tensor ${\mathbb{R}^{Timestep{\text{ }}p \times {\text{ }}Height{\text{ }} \times {\text{ }}Width{\text{ }} \times {\text{ }}Channel{\text{ }}}}$ in an analogous manner to video data, where each Timestep can be seen as one video frame, Height , Width is two-dimensional index for mesh-grids, and each Channel stores an aggregated scalar value for each mesh-grid. Specifically, given historical observations of crowd density and in-out flow x d = d 1 ,…,d t , xf = f 1 ,…, f t at timestamp t , we aim to build prediction models for the next-step density and in-out flow y d = d t +1, yf = f t +1, where y d means how many people will be in each mesh-grid at the next timestamp, and yf means how many people will flow into or out from each mesh-grid in next time interval. Al-though many deep models [1] – [6] have been proposed to address such tasks, their actual effects are still not well validated on large-scale and high-quality datasets. The datasets used in most of the works so far are originally generated based on taxi or bicycle trip data, which don’t cover and reflect the citywide crowd density and flow. Thus, we first publish new crowd flow data called BousaiTYO and BousaiOSA [7] . These new datasets are created using the GPS log data collected from a popular smartphone app of Yahoo! Japan Corporation, which can well reflect the real-world crowd flow in Tokyo and Osaka. As shown by Table 1 , our dataset has: (1) larger spatial area; (2) finer mesh size; (3) higher user sample.
Renhe Jiang, Zekun Cai, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Chuang Yang 0002, Zipei Fan, Quanjun Chen, Kota Tsubouchi, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
IEEE Big Data2
2022 DeepCrowd: A Deep Model for Large-Scale Citywide Crowd Density and Flow Prediction (Extended abstract)
abstract
Predicting the density and flow of the crowd at a citywide level is significant for city management. By meshing a large urban area to a number of fine-grained mesh-grids, citywide crowd and traffic information in a continuous time period can be represented with 4D tensor (Timestep, Height, Width, Channel). Based on this, we revisit the density and in-out flow prediction problem and publish a new aggregated human mobility dataset generated from a real-world smartphone application. Compared with the existing ones, our dataset has larger mesh-grid number, finer-grained mesh size, and higher user sample. Towards such kind of large-scale crowd dataset, we propose a novel deep learning model called DeepCrowd by designing pyramid architectures and high-dimensional attention mechanism based on Convolutional LSTM. Both the datasets and codes are made available at https://github.com/deepkashiwa20/DeepCrowd.
Renhe Jiang, Zekun Cai, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Chuang Yang 0002, Zipei Fan, Quanjun Chen, Kota Tsubouchi, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
ICDE2
2022 Will you go where you search? A deep learning framework for estimating user search-and-go behavior
Renhe Jiang, Quanjun Chen, Zekun Cai, Zipei Fan, Xuan Song 0001, Kota Tsubouchi, Ryosuke Shibasaki
Neurocomputing3
2022 Predicting Citywide Crowd Dynamics at Big Events: A Deep Learning System
abstract
Event crowd management has been a significant research topic with high social impact. When some big events happen such as an earthquake, typhoon, and national festival, crowd management becomes the first priority for governments (e.g., police) and public service operators (e.g., subway/bus operator) to protect people’s safety or maintain the operation of public infrastructures. However, under such event situations, human behavior will become very different from daily routines, which makes prediction of crowd dynamics at big events become highly challenging, especially at a citywide level. Therefore in this study, we aim to extract the “deep” trend only from the current momentary observations and generate an accurate prediction for the trend in the short future, which is considered to be an effective way to deal with the event situations. Motivated by these, we build an online system called DeepUrbanEvent, which can iteratively take citywide crowd dynamics from the current one hour as input and report the prediction results for the next one hour as output. A novel deep learning architecture built with recurrent neural networks is designed to effectively model these highly complex sequential data in an analogous manner to video prediction tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methodology to the existing approaches. Lastly, we apply our prototype system to multiple big real-world events and show that it is highly deployable as an online crowd management system.
Renhe Jiang, Zekun Cai, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Chuang Yang 0002, Zipei Fan, Quanjun Chen, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol.2
2021 DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction
abstract
Nowadays, with the rapid development of IoT (Internet of Things) and CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) technologies, big spatiotemporal data are being generated from mobile phones, car navigation systems, and traffic sensors. By leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning technologies on such data, urban traffic prediction has drawn a lot of attention in AI and Intelligent Transportation System community. The problem can be uniformly modeled with a 3D tensor (T, N, C), where T denotes the total time steps, N denotes the size of the spatial domain (i.e., mesh-grids or graph-nodes), and C denotes the channels of information. According to the specific modeling strategy, the state-of-the-art deep learning models can be divided into three categories: grid-based, graph-based, and multivariate time-series models. In this study, we first synthetically review the deep traffic models as well as the widely used datasets, then build a standard benchmark to comprehensively evaluate their performances with the same settings and metrics. Our study named DL-Traff is implemented with two most popular deep learning frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow and PyTorch, which is already publicly available as two GitHub repositories https://github.com/deepkashiwa20/DL-Traff-Grid and https://github.com/deepkashiwa20/DL-Traff-Graph. With DL-Traff, we hope to deliver a useful resource to researchers who are interested in spatiotemporal data analysis.
Renhe Jiang, Du Yin, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Jiewen Deng, Hangchen Liu, Zekun Cai, Jinliang Deng, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
CIKM7
2021 Spatio-Temporal-Categorical Graph Neural Networks for Fine-Grained Multi-Incident Co-Prediction
abstract
Forecasting incident occurrences (e.g. crime, EMS, traffic accident) is a crucial task for emergency service providers and transportation agencies in performing response time optimization and dynamic fleet management. However, such events are by nature rare and sparse, which causes the label imbalance problem and inferior performance of models relying on data sufficiency. The existing studies circumvent, instead of truly solving, this issue by defining the incident prediction problem in a coarse-grained temporal (e.g. daily) setting, which leaves the proposed models unrobust to fine-grained dynamics and trivial for the real-world decision making. In this paper, we tackle the temporally fine-grained incident prediction problem in a sparse setting by explicitly exploiting the behind-the-scene chainlike triggering mechanism. Moreover, this chain effect roots in multiple domains (i.e. spatial, categorical), which further entangles with the temporal dimension and happens to be time-variant. To be specific, we propose a novel deep learning framework, namely Spatio-Temporal-Categorical Graph Neural Networks (STC-GNN), to handle the multidimensional and dynamic chain effect for performing fine-grained multi-incident co-prediction. Extensive experiments on three real-world city-level incident datasets verify the insightfulness of our perspective and effectiveness of the proposed model.
Zhaonan Wang 0001, Renhe Jiang, Zekun Cai, Zipei Fan, Xin Liu 0020, Kyoung-Sook Kim 0001, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
CIKM3
2021 Countrywide Origin-Destination Matrix Prediction and Its Application for COVID-19
Renhe Jiang, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Zekun Cai, Chuang Yang 0002, Zipei Fan, Tianqi Xia, Go Matsubara, Hiroto Mizuseki, Xuan Song 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
ECML/PKDD (4)3
2020 Learn to Recover Visible Color for Video Surveillance in a Day
Guangming Wu, Yinqiang Zheng, Zhiling Guo, Zekun Cai, Xiaodan Shi, Yifei Huang 0002, Ryosuke Shibasaki
ECCV (1)4
2020 DualSIN: Dual Sequential Interaction Network for Human Intentional Mobility Prediction
abstract
Nowadays, GPS devices have increased explosively and produced huge amounts of trajectory data related to people's outgoing. Through those big location data, many researches aim to analyze human mobility for urban development, such as human movement prediction/modeling, POI (Point-Of-Interest) recommendation. However, trajectory data only contains timestamp and location information. The intention of human movement is not explicit so that it is hard to understand why people go to somewhere. The intention prior to the activity could be of great significance for analyzing and predicting human mobility, which has not been taken into consideration by the existing researches until the present. Thus, in this study, we propose a brand-new concept called human intentional mobility, aiming to employ intention information to predict people's outgoing. We carefully utilize user's search query to sense his intention as well as the intensity. For instance, if a user searches a certain POI for many times in a short period, it will represent a relatively high intention to go there. Then, to fully utilize this intention representation for predicting whether user will visit searched POI or not, we specially design Dual Sequential Interaction Network (DualSIN) as a novel and unique deep-learning model, which can effectively capture the sophisticated interactions among two kinds of sequential information (i.e., search sequence and mobility sequence) and typical categorical information (i.e., user attributes). Last, we evaluate our model on real-world dataset collected from Yahoo! Japan portal application, and demonstrate that it can achieve superior satisfactory performances to the-state-of-the-art models on multiple POI search queries.
Quanjun Chen, Renhe Jiang, Chuang Yang 0002, Zekun Cai, Zipei Fan, Kota Tsubouchi, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Xuan Song 0001
SIGSPATIAL/GIS4
2019 DeepUrbanEvent: A System for Predicting Citywide Crowd Dynamics at Big Events
abstract
Event crowd management has been a significant research topic with high social impact. When some big events happen such as an earthquake, typhoon, and national festival, crowd management becomes the first priority for governments (e.g. police) and public service operators (e.g. subway/bus operator) to protect people's safety or maintain the operation of public infrastructures. However, under such event situations, human behavior will become very different from daily routines, which makes prediction of crowd dynamics at big events become highly challenging, especially at a citywide level. Therefore in this study, we aim to extract the deep trend only from the current momentary observations and generate an accurate prediction for the trend in the short future, which is considered to be an effective way to deal with the event situations. Motivated by these, we build an online system called DeepUrbanEvent which can iteratively take citywide crowd dynamics from the current one hour as input and report the prediction results for the next one hour as output. A novel deep learning architecture built with recurrent neural networks is designed to effectively model these highly-complex sequential data in an analogous manner to video prediction tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methodology to the existing approaches. Lastly, we apply our prototype system to multiple big real-world events and show that it is highly deployable as an online crowd management system.
Renhe Jiang, Xuan Song 0001, Dou Huang, Xiaoya Song, Tianqi Xia, Zekun Cai, Zhaonan Wang 0001, Kyoung-Sook Kim 0001, Ryosuke Shibasaki
KDD6
2019 Trust Repair in Human-Swarm Teams+
abstract
Swarm robots are coordinated via simple control laws to generate emergent behaviors such as flocking, rendezvous, and deployment. Human-swarm teaming has been widely proposed for scenarios, such as human-supervised teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for disaster rescue, UAV and ground vehicle cooperation for building security, and soldier-UAV teaming in combat. Effective cooperation requires an appropriate level of trust, between a human and a swarm. When an UAV swarm is deployed in a real-world environment, its performance is subject to real-world factors, such as system reliability and wind disturbances. Degraded performance of a robot can cause undesired swarm behaviors, decreasing human trust. This loss of trust, in turn, can trigger human intervention in UAVs' task executions, decreasing cooperation effectiveness if inappropriate. Therefore, to promote effective cooperation we propose and test a trust-repairing method (Trust-repair) restoring performance and human trust in the swarm to an appropriate level by correcting undesired swarm behaviors. Faulty swarms caused by both external and internal factors were simulated to evaluate the performance of the Trust-repair algorithm in repairing swarm performance and restoring human trust. Results show that Trust-repair is effective in restoring trust to a level intermediate between normal and faulty conditions.
Zekun Cai, Michael Lewis 0001, Joseph B. Lyons, Katia P. Sycara
RO-MAN2
2019 Fine-grained probability counting for cardinality estimation of data streams
Lun Wang 0001, Tong Yang 0003, Hao Wang 0005, Jie Jiang 0008, Zekun Cai, Bin Cui 0001, Xiaoming Li 0001
World Wide Web5