# FlashST: A Simple and Universal Prompt-Tuning Framework for Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [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)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02908/) (2020)
- [Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08679/) (2021)
- [Graph Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12811/) (2020)
- [Deep Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Network for Taxi Demand Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08714/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05233/) (2022)
- [PDFormer: Propagation Delay-Aware Dynamic Long-Range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07945/) (2023)
- [LargeST: A Benchmark Dataset for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08259/) (2023)
- [Pre-training Enhanced Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09113/) (2022)
- [Repository-Level Prompt Generation for Large Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12839/) (2022)
- [UrbanGPT: Spatio-Temporal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00813/) (2024)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00990/) (2022)
- [Towards Spatio-Temporal Aware Traffic Time Series Forecasting--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15737/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [OpenCity: Open Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10269/) (2024)
- [BIGCity: A Universal Spatiotemporal Model for Unified Trajectory and Traffic State Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00953/) (2024)
- [MM-Path: Multi-modal, Multi-granularity Path Representation Learning -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18428/) (2024)
- [Expand and Compress: Exploring Tuning Principles for Continual Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12593/) (2024)
- [Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models via the Pipeline Lens: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01364/) (2025)
- [Learning with Calibration: Exploring Test-Time Computing of Spatio-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00635/) (2025)
- [Strada-LLM: Graph LLM for traffic prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20856/) (2024)
- [Urban Computing in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02009/) (2025)
- [STM-Graph: A Python Framework for Spatio-Temporal Mapping and Graph Neural Network Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10528/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Ride-Hailing Forecasting at DiDi with Multi-View Geospatial Representation Learning from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10502/) (2026)
- [Distribution-aware Online Continual Learning for Urban Spatio-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15893/) (2024)
- [HiMoE: Heterogeneity-Informed Mixture-of-Experts for Fair Spatial-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00316/) (2024)
- [CONTINA: Confidence Interval for Traffic Demand Prediction with Coverage Guarantee](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13961/) (2025)
- [FedTDP: A Privacy-Preserving and Unified Framework for Trajectory Data Preparation via Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05155/) (2025)
- [Dimensional Balance Improves Large Scale Spatiotemporal Prediction Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18793/) (2026)
- [GeoGNN: Time Series Geo-Localization using Two-Tower Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08303/) (2026)
- [MP3: Multi-Period Pattern Pre-training for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13119/) (2026)
- [CIWI-CKT: Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion and Cross-City Knowledge Transfer for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15642/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The objective of traffic prediction is to accurately forecast and analyze the dynamics of transportation patterns, considering both space and time. However, the presence of distribution shift poses a significant challenge in this field, as existing models struggle to generalize well when faced with test data that significantly differs from the training distribution. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces a simple and universal spatio-temporal prompt-tuning framework-FlashST, which adapts pre-trained models to the specific characteristics of diverse downstream datasets, improving generalization in diverse traffic prediction scenarios. Specifically, the FlashST framework employs a lightweight spatio-temporal prompt network for in-context learning, capturing spatio-temporal invariant knowledge and facilitating effective adaptation to diverse scenarios. Additionally, we incorporate a distribution mapping mechanism to align the data distributions of pre-training and downstream data, facilitating effective knowledge transfer in spatio-temporal forecasting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our FlashST across different spatio-temporal prediction tasks using diverse urban datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HKUDS/FlashST.