# Enhancing the Robustness via Adversarial Learning and Joint Spatial-Temporal Embeddings in Traffic Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07719/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11174/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Spatial-Temporal Graph ODE Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12931/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [Graph Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03558/) (2021)
- [DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09091/) (2021)
- [Learning Traffic as Images: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Large-Scale Transportation Network Speed Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04245/) (2017)
- [Z-GCNETs: Time Zigzags at Graph Convolutional Networks for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04100/) (2021)
- [STG2Seq: Spatial-temporal Graph to Sequence Model for Multi-step Passenger Demand Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10069/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Adaptive Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04828/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Trajectory Data Management, Analytics, and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11547/) (2020)
- [Spatiotemporal Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Traffic Prediction in Transportation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02699/) (2017)
- [TextKD-GAN: Text Generation using KnowledgeDistillation and Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01976/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Semantic and Positional Self-Attention Network for Document Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07148/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [EasyDGL: Encode, Train and Interpret for Continuous-time Dynamic Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12341/) (2023)
- [Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00397/) (2024)
- [Frequency Enhanced Pre-training for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02614/) (2024)
- [ST-FiT: Inductive Spatial-Temporal Forecasting with Limited Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10912/) (2024)
- [Alleviating Performance Disparity in Adversarial Spatiotemporal Graph Learning Under Zero-Inflated Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00721/) (2025)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Advances, Applications and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00713/) (2024)
- [Robust Traffic Forecasting against Spatial Shift over Years](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00373/) (2024)
- [Sim-MSTNet: sim2real based Multi-task SpatioTemporal Network Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21384/) (2026)
- [Unveiling the Inflexibility of Adaptive Embedding in Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11448/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Traffic Flow Forecasting: From Transition to Generatation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14248/) (2025)
- [Deep Time-Series Forecasting in 10 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19899/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic forecasting is an essential problem in urban planning and computing. The complex dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies among traffic objects (e.g., sensors and road segments) have been calling for highly flexible models; unfortunately, sophisticated models may suffer from poor robustness especially in capturing the trend of the time series (1st-order derivatives with time), leading to unrealistic forecasts. To address the challenge of balancing dynamics and robustness, we propose TrendGCN, a new scheme that extends the flexibility of GCNs and the distribution-preserving capacity of generative and adversarial loss for handling sequential data with inherent statistical correlations. On the one hand, our model simultaneously incorporates spatial (node-wise) embeddings and temporal (time-wise) embeddings to account for heterogeneous space-and-time convolutions; on the other hand, it uses GAN structure to systematically evaluate statistical consistencies between the real and the predicted time series in terms of both the temporal trending and the complex spatial-temporal dependencies. Compared with traditional approaches that handle step-wise predictive errors independently, our approach can produce more realistic and robust forecasts. Experiments on six benchmark traffic forecasting datasets and theoretical analysis both demonstrate the superiority and the state-of-the-art performance of TrendGCN. Source code is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/TrendGCN.