Yuan Yuan (苑 苑)

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, working with Prof. Laure Zanna and Prof. Carlos Fernandez-Granda, and Prof. Joan Bruna, and as a member of Multiscale Machine Learning In Coupled Earth System Modeling (M²LInES). Previously, I completed my PhD at FIBLAB, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Depeng Jin and Prof. Yong Li. I received my bachelor degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2020.

My research centers on developing scalable artificial intelligence methodologies for real-world spatiotemporal systems, with applications in climate dynamics, urban systems, and energy infrastructures. I aim to build robust foundation models that capture complex interdependencies across spatial and temporal scales, enabling intelligent reasoning and decision-making in dynamic and uncertain environments.

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1126 Warren Weaver Hall, New York, NY 10012

Research Interests

  • Foundation Models for Real-World Systems: AI foundation models for Earth systems, urban foundation models
  • Human & Urban Dynamics Modeling: human behavior modeling, generative mobility modeling, and urban-scale predictions

News

  • [New!] [2025.10] We are excited to release a global open data for human mobility, WorldMove, by leveraging publicly available multi-source data. The accompanying paper has been accepted by Scientific Data.
  • [New!] [2025.9] Our paper on urban foundation models, UrbanDiT, has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
  • [New!] [2025.9] 🏆 Delighted to share that our UniST paper has been recognized as a Top-3 Most Influential Paper at KDD 2025.
  • [New!] [2025.8] Two papers on mobility foundation models, MoveGCL and UniMove, have been accepted to ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025.
  • [New!][2025.6] I am honored to receive the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Outstanding Ph.D. Graduate Award from Tsinghua University.
  • [New!] [2025.6] Our survey on world models has been published in ACM Computing Surveys. Check out our gularly updated paper list at World-Model on GitHub. Open to discussions and collaborations!
  • [New!][2025.5] I successfully defended my Ph.D.! 😊 Deep thanks to Prof. Depeng Jin, Prof. Li Yong, and to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey.
  • [New!] [2025.3] Our paper on learning the complexity of urban mobility, DeepMobility, has been published in PNAS Nexus.
  • [New!] [2025.2] We are happy to release our new urban spatio-temporal foundation models — UniST-v2 and UniFlow. UniST-v2 has been published in IEEE TKDE.
  • [New!] [2025.1] Two papers on noise priors for diffusion models have been accepted by IJCAI 2025 (NPDiff) and WWW 2025 (CoDiffMob).
  • [New!] [2024.8] Our paper UniST is accepted by KDD 2024, which built a one-for-all foundation model for urban spatio-temporal prediction. The code, pretrained weights and data (over 130$m$ points) are released here.
  • [New!] [2024.5] Our paper about spatio-temporal few-shot learning with diffusion model is accepted to ICLR 2024. Feel free to try our code on cross-city transfer tasks.

Selected Publications

Google scholar for full list.

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Diffusion Transformers as Open-World Spatiotemporal Foundation Models


Yuan Yuan, Chonghua Han, Jingtao Ding, Guozhen Zhang, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
NeurIPS, 2025
paper / pdf / code /

We build a foundation model for open-world spatiotemporal learning that successfully scales up diffusion transformers.

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WorldMove, a global open data for human mobility


Yuan Yuan*, Yuheng Zhang*, Jingtao Ding, Yong Li, *Equal contribution
Scientific Data, 2025
paper / pdf / code / website /

WorldMove is an open access worldwide human mobility dataset. It accurately reflects real-world mobility patterns and ensures authenticity and reliability for urban mobility research.

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Unveiling the Power of Noise Priors: Enhancing Diffusion Models for Mobile Traffic Prediction


Zhi Sheng*, Yuan Yuan*, Jingtao Ding, Qi Yan, Xi Zheng, Yue Sun, Yong Li, *Equal contribution
IJCAI, 2025
paper / pdf / code /

NPDiff introduces novel noise priors for advancing mobile traffci prediction.

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Breaking Data Silos: Towards Open and Scalable Mobility Foundation Models via Generative Continual Learning


Yuan Yuan*, Yukun Liu*, Chonghua Han, Jingtao Ding, Jie Feng, Yong Li, *Equal contribution
SIGSPATIAL, 2025
paper / pdf / code /

MoveGCL is a scalable, privacy-preserving framework that enables training mobility foundation models without sharing raw data, which enables decentralized and progressive model evolution.

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UniMove: A Unified Model for Multi-city Human Mobility Prediction


Chonghua Han*, Yuan Yuan*, Yukun Liu, Jingtao Ding, Jie Feng, Yong Li, *Equal contribution
SIGSPATIAL, 2025
paper / pdf / code /

UniMove is a foundational-style mobility model that learns universal spatial representations and city-adaptive movement patterns.

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Learning the complexity of urban mobility with deep generative network


Yuan Yuan, Jingtao Ding, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
PNAS Nexus, 2025
paper / pdf / code /

DeepMobility integrates micro- and macro-scale mobility dynamics within a single generative architecture, enabling realistic synthetic trajectories and flows.

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UniST: A Prompt-Empowered Universal Model for Urban Spatio-Temporal Prediction


Yuan Yuan, Jingtao Ding, Jie Feng, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
KDD, 2024
paper / pdf / code / slides /

We build a universal model for general spatio-temporal prediction and show the benefits of a one-for-all solution in urban contexts.

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Spatio-Temporal Few-Shot Learning via Diffusive Neural Network Generation


Yuan Yuan*, Chenyang Shao*, Jingtao Ding, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
ICLR, 2024
paper / pdf / code /

This diffusion-based framework performs generative pre-training on a collection of model parameters. By generating customized model parameters, we manage to address spatio-temporal few-shot learning.

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Spatio-temporal Diffusion Point Processes


Yuan Yuan, Jingtao Ding, Chenyang Shao, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
KDD, 2023
paper / pdf / code /

We develop a diffusion model to learn spatio-temporal point processes.

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Learning to Simulate Daily Activities via Modeling Dynamic Human Needs


Yuan Yuan, Huandong Wang, Jingtao Ding, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
The Web Conference, 2023
paper / pdf / code /

We introduce the modeling of dynamic human needs into activity simulation.

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Activity Trajectory Generation via Modeling Spatiotemporal Dynamics


Yuan Yuan, Jingtao Ding, Huandong Wang, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
KDD, 2022
paper / pdf / code /

ActSTD captures spatiotemporal dynamics underlying activity trajectories by leveraging neural differential equations.


Design and source code from Jon Barron's website