TMAE: Entropy-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Low-Cost Traffic Flow Map Inference

Accurate traffic flow measurement is essential for the development of smart cities, yet the deployment of ubiquitous monitoring sensors using traditional methods is often cost-prohibitive. This article proposes an innovative entropy-aware masked autoencoder framework, namely TMAE, for low-cost traffic flow inference. TMAE leverages a small number of selectively measured regions with few deployed sensors to infer traffic flow across entire urban areas, incorporating prior knowledge from road distribution maps. Specifically, TMAE employs a shared encoder to process traffic flow context, using self-attention scores to identify the importance of each region and guide a masking policy that retains regions rich in traffic flow information. The road distribution map, reflecting inherent traffic flow patterns, is incorporated as prior knowledge by substituting masked tokens during training. A cross-attention mechanism in the decoder further refines inference, where embeddings from the road distribution map serve as queries, and retained visible patches act as keys and values. Additionally, regional traffic entropy is introduced to quantify the information richness of each region, enabling the selection of minimal measurement regions to optimize inference for other areas. Extensive experiments conducted on datasets from various cities demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of TMAE, highlighting its potential as a scalable solution for low-cost traffic flow inference in urban environments. The source code of this work is released at https://github.com/TextGraph/TMAE.