# Adaptive Graph Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08804/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00982/) (2020)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [Do Transformers Really Perform Bad for Graph Representation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05234/) (2021)
- [Structured Sequence Modeling with Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07659/) (2016)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [Deep Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Network for Taxi Demand Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08714/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Spatial-Temporal Similarity: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01254/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Time Series: Forecasting, Classification, Imputation, and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03759/) (2023)
- [AI-native Interconnect Framework for Integration of Large Language Model Technologies in 6G Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05842/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Graph Representation Learning with Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05729/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Literature Review of Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network Models for Time Series Forecasting and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22377/) (2024)
- [Segment, Shuffle, and Stitch: A Simple Layer for Improving Time-Series Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20082/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Trend Fusion Module for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10796/) (2025)
- [DiffLight: A Partial Rewards Conditioned Diffusion Model for Traffic Signal Control with Missing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22938/) (2024)
- [Scalable Transformer for High Dimensional Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04245/) (2024)
- [Spatial-temporal traffic modeling with a fusion graph reconstructed by tensor decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05653/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Intra-Period and Inter-Period Features for Enhanced Passenger Flow Prediction of Subway Stations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14727/) (2024)
- [Multi-grained spatial-temporal feature complementarity for accurate online cellular traffic prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08281/) (2025)
- [Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18467/) (2025)
- [Learning to Factorize and Adapt: A Versatile Approach Toward Universal Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12083/) (2026)
- [Counterfactual Graph Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00391/) (2023)
- [SGRU: A High-Performance Structured Gated Recurrent Unit for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11854/) (2024)
- [Lightweight and Interpretable Transformer via Mixed Graph Algorithm Unrolling for Traffic Forecast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13102/) (2025)
- [STGAtt: A Spatial-Temporal Unified Graph Attention Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16685/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic flow forecasting on graphs has real-world applications in many fields, such as transportation system and computer networks. Traffic forecasting can be highly challenging due to complex spatial-temporal correlations and non-linear traffic patterns. Existing works mostly model such spatial-temporal dependencies by considering spatial correlations and temporal correlations separately and fail to model the direct spatial-temporal correlations. Inspired by the recent success of transformers in the graph domain, in this paper, we propose to directly model the cross-spatial-temporal correlations on the spatial-temporal graph using local multi-head self-attentions. To reduce the time complexity, we set the attention receptive field to the spatially neighboring nodes, and we also introduce an adaptive graph to capture the hidden spatial-temporal dependencies. Based on these attention mechanisms, we propose a novel Adaptive Graph Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network (ASTTN), which stacks multiple spatial-temporal attention layers to apply self-attention on the input graph, followed by linear layers for predictions. Experimental results on public traffic network datasets, METR-LA PEMS-BAY, PeMSD4, and PeMSD7, demonstrate the superior performance of our model.