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Main Authors: Liu, Zijin, Geng, Xu, Xu, Wenshuai, Zhao, Xiang, Xia, Yan, Song, You
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02756
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author Liu, Zijin
Geng, Xu
Xu, Wenshuai
Zhao, Xiang
Xia, Yan
Song, You
author_facet Liu, Zijin
Geng, Xu
Xu, Wenshuai
Zhao, Xiang
Xia, Yan
Song, You
contents Accurate crowd simulation is crucial for public safety management, emergency evacuation planning, and intelligent transportation systems. However, existing methods, which typically model crowds as a collection of independent individual trajectories, are limited in their ability to capture macroscopic physical laws. This microscopic approach often leads to error accumulation and compromises simulation stability. Furthermore, deep learning-driven methods tend to suffer from low inference efficiency and high computational overhead, making them impractical for large-scale, efficient simulations. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Decoupled Differential Equation Network (STDDN), a novel framework that guides microscopic trajectory prediction with macroscopic physics. We innovatively introduce the continuity equation from fluid dynamics as a strong physical constraint. A Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) is employed to model the macroscopic density evolution driven by individual movements, thereby physically regularizing the microscopic trajectory prediction model. We design a density-velocity coupled dynamic graph learning module to formulate the derivative of the density field within the Neural ODE, effectively mitigating error accumulation. We also propose a differentiable density mapping module to eliminate discontinuous gradients caused by discretization and introduce a cross-grid detection module to accurately model the impact of individual cross-grid movements on local density changes. The proposed STDDN method has demonstrated significantly superior simulation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on long-term tasks across four real-world datasets, as well as a major reduction in inference latency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02756
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STDDN: A Physics-Guided Deep Learning Framework for Crowd Simulation
Liu, Zijin
Geng, Xu
Xu, Wenshuai
Zhao, Xiang
Xia, Yan
Song, You
Machine Learning
Accurate crowd simulation is crucial for public safety management, emergency evacuation planning, and intelligent transportation systems. However, existing methods, which typically model crowds as a collection of independent individual trajectories, are limited in their ability to capture macroscopic physical laws. This microscopic approach often leads to error accumulation and compromises simulation stability. Furthermore, deep learning-driven methods tend to suffer from low inference efficiency and high computational overhead, making them impractical for large-scale, efficient simulations. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Decoupled Differential Equation Network (STDDN), a novel framework that guides microscopic trajectory prediction with macroscopic physics. We innovatively introduce the continuity equation from fluid dynamics as a strong physical constraint. A Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) is employed to model the macroscopic density evolution driven by individual movements, thereby physically regularizing the microscopic trajectory prediction model. We design a density-velocity coupled dynamic graph learning module to formulate the derivative of the density field within the Neural ODE, effectively mitigating error accumulation. We also propose a differentiable density mapping module to eliminate discontinuous gradients caused by discretization and introduce a cross-grid detection module to accurately model the impact of individual cross-grid movements on local density changes. The proposed STDDN method has demonstrated significantly superior simulation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on long-term tasks across four real-world datasets, as well as a major reduction in inference latency.
title STDDN: A Physics-Guided Deep Learning Framework for Crowd Simulation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02756