arXiv AI

Do We Really Need Transformers for Global Spatial Information Extraction in Traffic Forecasting?

arXiv:2607. 12462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing traffic forecasting models commonly focus on extracting spatial dependencies, particularly global spatial information, which characterizes the representations obtained through interactions between each individual node and all nodes across the traffic network.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

Do We Really Need Adaptive Global Spatial Attention for Traffic Forecasting?

arXiv:2607. 12462v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing traffic forecasting models commonly focus on extracting spatial dependencies, particularly global spatial information, which characterizes the representations obtained through interactions between each node and all nodes across the traffic network.

By Qihang Zhang, Siyao Zhang, Letao Kang, Wenzhe Liang, Miao Zhang, Zhao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Explaining spatial information flow in short-term traffic forecasting models using a gated graph attention network

The paper introduces a gated graph attention network (GAT) to better explain spatial information flow in short‑term traffic forecasting models. By adding a gate that learns how much of a sensor’s updated state comes from its neighbors versus itself, the authors can progressively withdraw neighbor information and observe its impact on accuracy. Applied to the ST‑MetaNet architecture on data from 498 loop detectors in England, the gated GAT shows that neighbor influence is higher for busy sensors, improves accuracy slightly with mild regularisation, and reveals that the two GAT layers are largely redundant.

By Yue Li, Shujuan Chen, Ying Jin
arXiv Statistics ML
2d ago

STCFormer: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Modeling with Dynamic Cluster Transformer for Station-based Weather Forecasting

STCFormer is an adaptive spatio‑temporal Transformer that dynamically clusters weather stations within each temporal patch, combining fine‑grained local attention inside clusters with global attention over regional summaries. The model’s design is supported by a Lipschitz upper bound that suggests robustness benefits, and it achieves the lowest 24‑hour mean squared error across eight temperature and wind forecasting tasks on three real‑world datasets, ranking first or second in 47 of 48 comparisons. Ablation studies and case analyses confirm the advantages of locally adaptive grouping and complementary local‑global interactions.

By Rongwen Li, Haixin Xie, Mingyang Wang, Hongwu Liu, Kun Fang, Changjian Chen, Zhuo Tang, Kenli Li
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Learning Local Heterogeneity and Cross-Region Context for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting

The paper introduces LoReST, a Local-Region Spatial Temporal network designed for large-scale traffic forecasting. LoReST captures local spatial heterogeneity by relation-aware aggregation within node neighborhoods and incorporates cross-region context through mean pooling, inter-region attention, and broadcasting back to nodes. Experiments on the LargeST benchmark demonstrate significant improvements, reducing MAE, RMSE, and MAPE by 4.78%, 3.60%, and 5.75% respectively.

By Qi Feng, Zidong Wang, Bo Li, Xiaoguang Gao, Jiayu Zhang, Chenfeng Wang, Kaifang Wan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

FedeRICo: Federated Region-Influenced Coupling for Traffic Flow Prediction

FedeRICo is a federated traffic forecasting framework that addresses heterogeneity across client sensor subgraphs by combining gradient-level collaboration with boundary-aware residual communication. It uses a dual-branch architecture: a globally guided branch for transferable forecasting structure and a private residual branch that preserves client-specific corrections and incorporates boundary residual signals. Experiments on four real-world traffic benchmarks show that FedeRICo outperforms state‑of‑the‑art federated spatial‑temporal baselines while keeping training runtime competitive.

By Fermin Orozco, Man Luo, Johan Wahlstr\"om