# AutoSTL: Automated Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00235/) (2019)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Discrete Graph Structure Learning for Forecasting Multiple Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06861/) (2021)
- [Deep Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Network for Taxi Demand Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08714/) (2018)
- [Coupled Layer-wise Graph Convolution for Transportation Demand Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08080/) (2020)
- [AutoCTS: Automated Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11174/) (2021)
- [Joint Air Quality and Weather Prediction Based on Multi-Adversarial Spatiotemporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15037/) (2020)
- [RiskOracle: A Minute-level Citywide Traffic Accident Forecasting Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00819/) (2020)
- [AutoLoss: Automated Loss Function Search in Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06713/) (2021)
- [ST-PIL: Spatial-Temporal Periodic Interest Learning for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02262/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11582/) (2023)
- [G3: An Effective and Adaptive Framework for Worldwide Geolocalization Using Large Multi-Modality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14702/) (2024)
- [MLPST: MLP is All You Need for Spatio-Temporal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13363/) (2023)
- [PromptST: Prompt-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Multi-Attribute Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09500/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Sensors Modeling: Hierarchical Information Enhanced Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11284/) (2023)
- [AutoSTF: Decoupled Neural Architecture Search for Cost-Effective Automated Spatio-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16586/) (2024)
- [Learning to Wander: Improving the Global Image Geolocation Ability of LMMs via Actionable Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10463/) (2026)
- [DANCE: Resource-Efficient Neural Architecture Search with Data-Aware and Continuous Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04671/) (2025)
- [We Need a More Robust Classifier: Dual Causal Learning Empowers Domain-Incremental Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10312/) (2026)
- [Neural Architecture Search for Traffic Prediction: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26467/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-Temporal prediction plays a critical role in smart city construction. Jointly modeling multiple spatio-temporal tasks can further promote an intelligent city life by integrating their inseparable relationship. However, existing studies fail to address this joint learning problem well, which generally solve tasks individually or a fixed task combination. The challenges lie in the tangled relation between different properties, the demand for supporting flexible combinations of tasks and the complex spatio-temporal dependency. To cope with the problems above, we propose an Automated Spatio-Temporal multi-task Learning (AutoSTL) method to handle multiple spatio-temporal tasks jointly. Firstly, we propose a scalable architecture consisting of advanced spatio-temporal operations to exploit the complicated dependency. Shared modules and feature fusion mechanism are incorporated to further capture the intrinsic relationship between tasks. Furthermore, our model automatically allocates the operations and fusion weight. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verified that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. As we can know, AutoSTL is the first automated spatio-temporal multi-task learning method.