# STS-CCL: Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contextual Contrastive Learning for Urban Traffic Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02507/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Time-Series Representation Learning via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14112/) (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)
- [Learnable Fourier Features for Multi-Dimensional Spatial Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02795/) (2021)
- [How to Build a Graph-Based Deep Learning Architecture in Traffic Domain: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11691/) (2020)
- [When Do Contrastive Learning Signals Help Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11873/) (2021)
- [Learning an Effective Context-Response Matching Model with Self-Supervised Tasks for Retrieval-based Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06265/) (2020)
- [RiskOracle: A Minute-level Citywide Traffic Accident Forecasting Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00819/) (2020)
- [Socially-Aware Self-Supervised Tri-Training for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03569/) (2021)
- [Regularized Graph Structure Learning with Semantic Knowledge for Multi-variates Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06126/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [HealthMamba: An Uncertainty-aware Spatiotemporal Graph State Space Model for Effective and Reliable Healthcare Facility Visit Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05286/) (2026)
- [SynHAT: A Two-stage Coarse-to-Fine Diffusion Framework for Synthesizing Human Activity Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14705/) (2026)
- [EnergyMamba: An Uncertainty-Aware Graph-Enhanced Selective State Space Model for Energy Consumption Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00506/) (2026)
- [MobiDiff: Semantic-Aware Multi-Channel Discrete Diffusion for Human Mobility Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08357/) (2026)
- [STGAtt: A Spatial-Temporal Unified Graph Attention Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16685/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficiently capturing the complex spatiotemporal representations from large-scale unlabeled traffic data remains to be a challenging task. In considering of the dilemma, this work employs the advanced contrastive learning and proposes a novel Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contextual Contrastive Learning (STS-CCL) model. First, we elaborate the basic and strong augmentation methods for spatiotemporal graph data, which not only perturb the data in terms of graph structure and temporal characteristics, but also employ a learning-based dynamic graph view generator for adaptive augmentation. Second, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contrastive Module (STS-CM) to simultaneously capture the decent spatial-temporal dependencies and realize graph-level contrasting. To further discriminate node individuals in negative filtering, a Semantic Contextual Contrastive method is designed based on semantic features and spatial heterogeneity, achieving node-level contrastive learning along with negative filtering. Finally, we present a hard mutual-view contrastive training scheme and extend the classic contrastive loss to an integrated objective function, yielding better performance. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that building a predictor upon STS-CCL contrastive learning model gains superior performance than existing traffic forecasting benchmarks. The proposed STS-CCL is highly suitable for large datasets with only a few labeled data and other spatiotemporal tasks with data scarcity issue.