Network traffic, as a key media format, is crucial for ensuring security and communications in modern internet infrastructure. While existing methods offer excellent performance, they face two key bottlenecks: (1) They fail to capture multidimensional semantics beyond unimodal sequence patterns. (2) Their black box property, i.e., providing only category labels, lacks an auditable reasoning process. We identify a key factor that existing network traffic datasets are primarily designed for classification and inherently lack rich semantic annotations, failing to generate human-readable evidence report. To address data scarcity, this paper proposes a Byte-Grounded Traffic Description (BGTD) benchmark for the first time, combining raw bytes with structured expert annotations. BGTD provides necessary behavioral features and verifiable chains of evidence for multimodal reasoning towards explainable encrypted traffic interpretation. Built upon BGTD, this paper proposes an end-to-end traffic-language representation framework (mmTraffic), a multimodal reasoning architecture bridging physical traffic encoding and semantic interpretation. In order to alleviate modality interference and genera
In the modern world, the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has contributed to improvements in various areas, including automation, computer vision, fraud detection, and more. AI can be leveraged to enhance the efficiency of Autonomous Smart Traffic Management (ASTM) systems and reduce traffic congestion rates. This paper presents an Autonomous Smart Traffic Management (STM) system that uses AI to improve traffic flow rates. The system employs the YOLO V5 Convolutional Neural Network to detect vehicles in traffic management images. Additionally, it predicts the number of vehicles for the next 12 hours using a Recurrent Neural Network with Long Short-Term Memory (RNN-LSTM). The Smart Traffic Management Cycle Length Analysis manages the traffic cycle length based on these vehicle predictions, aided by AI. From the results of the RNN-LSTM model for predicting vehicle numbers over the next 12 hours, we observe that the model predicts traffic with a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 4.521 vehicles and a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 2.232 vehicles. After simulating the STM system in the CARLA simulation environment, we found that the Traffic Management Congestion Flow Rate with A
In urban traffic management, the primary challenge of dynamically and efficiently monitoring traffic conditions is compounded by the insufficient utilization of thousands of surveillance cameras along the intelligent transportation system. This paper introduces the multi-level Traffic-responsive Tilt Camera surveillance system (TTC-X), a novel framework designed for dynamic and efficient monitoring and management of traffic in urban networks. By leveraging widely deployed pan-tilt-cameras (PTCs), TTC-X overcomes the limitations of a fixed field of view in traditional surveillance systems by providing mobilized and 360-degree coverage. The innovation of TTC-X lies in the integration of advanced machine learning modules, including a detector-predictor-controller structure, with a novel Predictive Correlated Online Learning (PiCOL) methodology and the Spatial-Temporal Graph Predictor (STGP) for real-time traffic estimation and PTC control. The TTC-X is tested and evaluated under three experimental scenarios (e.g., maximum traffic flow capture, dynamic route planning, traffic state estimation) based on a simulation environment calibrated using real-world traffic data in Brooklyn, New Y
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) support the information dissemination among vehicles, Roadside Units (RSUs), and a Trust Authority (TA). A trust model evaluates an entity or data or both to determine truthfulness. A security model confirms authentication, integrity, availability, non repudiation issues. With these aspects in mind, many models have been proposed in literature. Furthermore, many information dissemination approaches are proposed. However, the lack of a model that can manage traffic incidents completely inspires this work. This paper details how and when a message needs to be generated and relayed so that the incidents can be reported and managed in a timely manner. This paper addresses this challenge by providing a traffic incident management model to manage several traffic incidents efficiently. Additionally, we simulate this model using the VEINS simulator with vehicles, RSUs, and a TA. From the experiments, we measure the average number of transmissions required for reporting a single traffic incident while varying the vehicle density and relaying considerations. We consider two types of relaying. In one series of experiments, messages from regular vehicles and
Intersections are essential road infrastructures for traffic in modern metropolises. However, they can also be the bottleneck of traffic flows as a result of traffic incidents or the absence of traffic coordination mechanisms such as traffic lights. Recently, various control and coordination mechanisms that are beyond traditional control methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of intersection traffic by leveraging the ability of autonomous vehicles. Amongst these methods, the control of foreseeable mixed traffic that consists of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and robot vehicles (RVs) has emerged. We propose a decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for the control and coordination of mixed traffic by RVs at real-world, complex intersections -- an open challenge to date. We design comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness, robustness, generalizablility, and adaptability of our approach. In particular, our method can prevent congestion formation via merely 5% RVs under a real-world traffic demand of 700 vehicles per hour. In contrast, without RVs, congestion will form when the traffic demand reaches as low as 200 vehicles per hour. Moreover,
Predicting web service traffic has significant social value, as it can be applied to various practical scenarios, including but not limited to dynamic resource scaling, load balancing, system anomaly detection, service-level agreement compliance, and fraud detection. Web service traffic is characterized by frequent and drastic fluctuations over time and are influenced by heterogeneous web user behaviors, making accurate prediction a challenging task. Previous research has extensively explored statistical approaches, and neural networks to mine features from preceding service traffic time series for prediction. However, these methods have largely overlooked the causal relationships between services. Drawing inspiration from causality in ecological systems, we empirically recognize the causal relationships between web services. To leverage these relationships for improved web service traffic prediction, we propose an effective neural network module, CCMPlus, designed to extract causal relationship features across services. This module can be seamlessly integrated with existing time series models to consistently enhance the performance of web service traffic predictions. We theoretica
In the context of global urbanization and motorization, traffic congestion has become a significant issue, severely affecting the quality of life, environment, and economy. This paper puts forward a single-agent reinforcement learning (RL)-based regional traffic signal control (TSC) model. Different from multi - agent systems, this model can coordinate traffic signals across a large area, with the goals of alleviating regional traffic congestion and minimizing the total travel time. The TSC environment is precisely defined through specific state space, action space, and reward functions. The state space consists of the current congestion state, which is represented by the queue lengths of each link, and the current signal phase scheme of intersections. The action space is designed to select an intersection first and then adjust its phase split. Two reward functions are meticulously crafted. One focuses on alleviating congestion and the other aims to minimize the total travel time while considering the congestion level. The experiments are carried out with the SUMO traffic simulation software. The performance of the TSC model is evaluated by comparing it with a base case where no si
Traffic congestion, primarily driven by intersection queuing, significantly impacts urban living standards, safety, environmental quality, and economic efficiency. While Traffic Signal Control (TSC) systems hold potential for congestion mitigation, traditional optimization models often fail to capture real-world traffic complexity and dynamics. This study introduces a novel single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) framework for regional adaptive TSC, circumventing the coordination complexities inherent in multi-agent systems through a centralized decision-making paradigm. The model employs an adjacency matrix to unify the encoding of road network topology, real-time queue states derived from probe vehicle data, and current signal timing parameters. Leveraging the efficient learning capabilities of the DreamerV3 world model, the agent learns control policies where actions sequentially select intersections and adjust their signal phase splits to regulate traffic inflow/outflow, analogous to a feedback control system. Reward design prioritizes queue dissipation, directly linking congestion metrics (queue length) to control actions. Simulation experiments conducted in SUMO demonstrate
This paper offers openly available microscopic vehicle trajectory (MVT) datasets collected using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in heterogeneous, area-based urban traffic conditions. Traditional roadside video collection often fails in dense mixed traffic due to occlusion, limited viewing angles, and irregular vehicle movements. UAV-based recording provides a top-down perspective that reduces these issues and captures rich spatial and temporal dynamics. The datasets described here were extracted using the Data from Sky (DFS) platform and validated against manual counts, space mean speeds, and probe trajectories in earlier work. Each dataset contains time-stamped vehicle positions, speeds, longitudinal and lateral accelerations, and vehicle classifications at a resolution of 30 frames per second. Data were collected at six mid-block locations in the national capital region of India, covering diverse traffic compositions and density levels. Exploratory analyses highlight key behavioural patterns, including lane-keeping preferences, speed distributions, and lateral manoeuvres typical of heterogeneous and area-based traffic settings. These datasets are intended as a resource for the g
Optimal management of traffic light timing is one of the most effective factors in reducing urban traffic. In most old systems, fixed timing was used along with human factors to control traffic, which is not very efficient in terms of time and cost. Nowadays, methods in the field of traffic management are based on the use of artificial intelligence. In this method, by using real-time processing of video surveillance camera images along with reinforcement learning, the optimal timing of traffic lights is determined and applied according to several parameters. In the research, deep learning methods were used in vehicle detection using the YOLOv9-C model to estimate the number and other characteristics of vehicles such as speed. Finally, by modeling vehicles in an urban environment simulator at OpenAI Gym using multi-factor reinforcement learning and the DQN Rainbow algorithm, timing is applied to traffic lights at intersections. Additionally, the use of transfer learning along with retraining the model on images of Iranian cars has increased the accuracy of the model. The results of the proposed method show a model that is reasonably accurate in both parts of analyzing surveillance c
This study investigates the predictive capacity of environmental, temporal, and spatial factors on traffic accident severity in the United States. Using a dataset of 500,000 U.S. traffic accidents spanning 2016-2023, we trained an XGBoost classifier optimized through randomized search cross-validation and adjusted for class imbalance via class weighting. The final model achieves an overall accuracy of 78%, with strong performance on the majority class (Severity 2), attaining 87% precision and recall. Feature importance analysis reveals that time of day, geographic location, and weather-related variables, including visibility, temperature, and wind speed, rank among the strongest predictors of accident severity. However, contrary to initial hypotheses, precipitation and visibility demonstrate limited predictive power, potentially reflecting behavioral adaptation by drivers under overtly hazardous conditions. The dataset's predominance of mid-level severity accidents constrains the model's capacity to learn meaningful patterns for extreme cases, highlighting the need for alternative sampling strategies, enhanced feature engineering, and integration of external datasets. These finding
Transportation and traffic are currently undergoing a rapid increase in terms of both scale and complexity. At the same time, an increasing share of traffic participants are being transformed into agents driven or supported by artificial intelligence resulting in mixed-intelligence traffic. This work explores the implications of distributed decision-making in mixed-intelligence traffic. The investigations are carried out on the basis of an online-simulated highway scenario, namely the MIT \emph{DeepTraffic} simulation. In the first step traffic agents are trained by means of a deep reinforcement learning approach, being deployed inside an elitist evolutionary algorithm for hyperparameter search. The resulting architectures and training parameters are then utilized in order to either train a single autonomous traffic agent and transfer the learned weights onto a multi-agent scenario or else to conduct multi-agent learning directly. Both learning strategies are evaluated on different ratios of mixed-intelligence traffic. The strategies are assessed according to the average speed of all agents driven by artificial intelligence. Traffic patterns that provoke a reduction in traffic flow
Traffic speed forecasting is an important task in intelligent transportation system management. The objective of much of the current computational research is to minimize the difference between predicted and actual speeds, but information modalities other than speed priors are largely not taken into account. In particular, though state of the art performance is achieved on speed forecasting with graph neural network methods, these methods do not incorporate information on roadway maintenance work zones and their impacts on predicted traffic flows; yet, the impacts of construction work zones are of significant interest to roadway management agencies, because they translate to impacts on the local economy and public well-being. In this paper, we build over the convolutional graph neural network architecture and present a novel ``Graph Convolutional Network for Roadway Work Zones" model that includes a novel data fusion mechanism and a new heterogeneous graph aggregation methodology to accommodate work zone information in spatio-temporal dependencies among traffic states. The model is evaluated on two data sets that capture traffic flows in the presence of work zones in the Commonweal
Being widely adopted by the transportation and planning practitioners, the fundamental diagram (FD) is the primary tool used to relate the key macroscopic traffic variables of speed, flow, and density. We empirically analyze the relation between vehicular space-mean speeds and flows given different signal settings and postulate a parsimonious parametric function form of the traditional FD where its function parameters are explicitly modeled as a function of the signal plan factors. We validate the proposed formulation using data from signalized urban road segments in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The proposed formulation builds our understanding of how changes to signal settings impact the FDs, and more generally the congestion patterns, of signalized urban segments.
With the increasing prevalence of encrypted network traffic, cyber security analysts have been turning to machine learning (ML) techniques to elucidate the traffic on their networks. However, ML models can become stale as new traffic emerges that is outside of the distribution of the training set. In order to reliably adapt in this dynamic environment, ML models must additionally provide contextualized uncertainty quantification to their predictions, which has received little attention in the cyber security domain. Uncertainty quantification is necessary both to signal when the model is uncertain about which class to choose in its label assignment and when the traffic is not likely to belong to any pre-trained classes. We present a new, public dataset of network traffic that includes labeled, Virtual Private Network (VPN)-encrypted network traffic generated by 10 applications and corresponding to 5 application categories. We also present an ML framework that is designed to rapidly train with modest data requirements and provide both calibrated, predictive probabilities as well as an interpretable "out-of-distribution" (OOD) score to flag novel traffic samples. We describe calibrati
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly in smart home environments, has introduced considerable security and privacy concerns due to their persistent connectivity and interaction with cloud services. Despite advancements in IoT security, effective privacy measures remain uncovered, with existing solutions often relying on cloud-based threat detection that exposes sensitive data or outdated allow-lists that inadequately restrict non-essential network traffic. This work presents ML-IoTrim, a system for detecting and mitigating non-essential IoT traffic (i.e., not influencing the device operations) by analyzing network behavior at the edge, leveraging Machine Learning to classify network destinations. Our approach includes building a labeled dataset based on IoT device behavior and employing a feature-extraction pipeline to enable a binary classification of essential vs. non-essential network destinations. We test our framework in a consumer smart home setup with IoT devices from five categories, demonstrating that the model can accurately identify and block non-essential traffic, including previously unseen destinations, without relying on traditional al
Due to the global trend towards urbanization, people increasingly move to and live in cities that then continue to grow. Traffic forecasting plays an important role in the intelligent transportation systems of cities as well as in spatio-temporal data mining. State-of-the-art forecasting is achieved by deep-learning approaches due to their ability to contend with complex spatio-temporal dynamics. However, existing methods assume the input is fixed-topology road networks and static traffic time series. These assumptions fail to align with urbanization, where time series are collected continuously and road networks evolve over time. In such settings, deep-learning models require frequent re-initialization and re-training, imposing high computational costs. To enable much more efficient training without jeopardizing model accuracy, we propose the Topological Evolution-aware Framework (TEAM) for traffic forecasting that incorporates convolution and attention. This combination of mechanisms enables better adaptation to newly collected time series, while being able to maintain learned knowledge from old time series. TEAM features a continual learning module based on the Wasserstein metri
The recent popularity growth of Deep Learning (DL) re-ignited the interest towards traffic classification, with several studies demonstrating the accuracy of DL-based classifiers to identify Internet applications' traffic. Even with the aid of hardware accelerators (GPUs, TPUs), DL model training remains expensive, and limits the ability to operate frequent model updates necessary to fit to the ever evolving nature of Internet traffic, and mobile traffic in particular. To address this pain point, in this work we explore Incremental Learning (IL) techniques to add new classes to models without a full retraining, hence speeding up model's updates cycle. We consider iCarl, a state of the art IL method, and MIRAGE-2019, a public dataset with traffic from 40 Android apps, aiming to understand "if there is a case for incremental learning in traffic classification". By dissecting iCarl internals, we discuss ways to improve its design, contributing a revised version, namely iCarl+. Despite our analysis reveals their infancy, IL techniques are a promising research area on the roadmap towards automated DL-based traffic analysis systems.
This paper proposes a dynamic regression (DR) framework that enhances existing deep spatiotemporal models by incorporating structured learning for the error process in traffic forecasting. The framework relaxes the assumption of time independence by modeling the error series of the base model (i.e., a well-established traffic forecasting model) using a matrix-variate autoregressive (AR) model. The AR model is integrated into training by redesigning the loss function. The newly designed loss function is based on the likelihood of a non-isotropic error term, enabling the model to generate probabilistic forecasts while preserving the original outputs of the base model. Importantly, the additional parameters introduced by the DR framework can be jointly optimized alongside the base model. Evaluation on state-of-the-art (SOTA) traffic forecasting models using speed and flow datasets demonstrates improved performance, with interpretable AR coefficients and spatiotemporal covariance matrices enhancing the understanding of the model.
The popularity of Deep Learning (DL), coupled with network traffic visibility reduction due to the increased adoption of HTTPS, QUIC and DNS-SEC, re-ignited interest towards Traffic Classification (TC). However, to tame the dependency from task-specific large labeled datasets we need to find better ways to learn representations that are valid across tasks. In this work we investigate this problem comparing transfer learning, meta-learning and contrastive learning against reference Machine Learning (ML) tree-based and monolithic DL models (16 methods total). Using two publicly available datasets, namely MIRAGE19 (40 classes) and AppClassNet (500 classes), we show that (i) using large datasets we can obtain more general representations, (ii) contrastive learning is the best methodology and (iii) meta-learning the worst one, and (iv) while ML tree-based cannot handle large tasks but fits well small tasks, by means of reusing learned representations, DL methods are reaching tree-based models performance also for small tasks.