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