# USTEP: Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning under A Unified View

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05829 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05829/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04681/) (2015)
- [Multi-Object Representation Learning with Iterative Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00450/) (2019)
- [WeatherBench: A benchmark dataset for data-driven weather forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00469/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning for Physical Interaction through Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07157/) (2016)
- [Stochastic Variational Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11252/) (2017)
- [UniFormer: Unifying Convolution and Self-attention for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09450/) (2022)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [Disentangling Physical Dynamics from Unknown Factors for Unsupervised Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01460/) (2020)
- [SimVP: Simpler yet Better Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05099/) (2022)
- [PredRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network for Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09504/) (2021)
- [Mega: Moving Average Equipped Gated Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10655/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Adversarial Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01523/) (2018)
- [Decomposing Motion and Content for Natural Video Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08033/) (2017)
- [Earthformer: Exploring Space-Time Transformers for Earth System Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05833/) (2022)
- [PredRNN++: Towards A Resolution of the Deep-in-Time Dilemma in Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06300/) (2018)
- [Learning to Decompose and Disentangle Representations for Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04166/) (2018)
- [Improved Conditional VRNNs for Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12165/) (2019)
- [Video (language) modeling: a baseline for generative models of natural videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6604/) (2014)
- [Memory In Memory: A Predictive Neural Network for Learning Higher-Order Non-Stationarity from Spatiotemporal Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07490/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Video Dynamics with Predictive Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31050/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal predictive learning plays a crucial role in self-supervised learning, with wide-ranging applications across a diverse range of fields. Previous approaches for temporal modeling fall into two categories: recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods. The former, while meticulously processing frames one by one, neglect short-term spatio-temporal information redundancies, leading to inefficiencies. The latter naively stack frames sequentially, overlooking the inherent temporal dependencies. In this paper, we re-examine the two dominant temporal modeling approaches within the realm of spatio-temporal predictive learning, offering a unified perspective. Building upon this analysis, we introduce USTEP (Unified Spatio-TEmporal Predictive learning), an innovative framework that reconciles the recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods by integrating both micro-temporal and macro-temporal scales. Extensive experiments on a wide range of spatio-temporal predictive learning demonstrate that USTEP achieves significant improvements over existing temporal modeling approaches, thereby establishing it as a robust solution for a wide range of spatio-temporal applications.