# AutoSTF: Decoupled Neural Architecture Search for Cost-Effective Automated Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Modeling Long- and Short-Term Temporal Patterns with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07015/) (2017)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09641/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Data Mining: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04928/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09112/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Meta-Graph Learning for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14701/) (2022)
- [Multi-Range Attentive Bicomponent Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12093/) (2019)
- [AutoCTS: Automated Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11174/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Self-Supervised Learning for Crime Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08587/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Hierarchical Recurrent Graph Neural Network for City-Wide Parking Availability Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10516/) (2019)
- [Conditional Local Convolution for Spatio-temporal Meteorological Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01000/) (2021)
- [Practical Adversarial Attacks on Spatiotemporal Traffic Forecasting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02447/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13684/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Traffic Forecasting: A Unified Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05875/) (2022)
- [Joint Neural Architecture and Hyperparameter Search for Correlated Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16126/) (2022)
- [LightCTS: A Lightweight Framework for Correlated Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11974/) (2023)
- [Automated Dilated Spatio-Temporal Synchronous Graph Modeling for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10830/) (2022)
- [AutoSTL: Automated Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09174/) (2023)

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

- [DiMA: An LLM-Powered Ride-Hailing Assistant at DiDi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04768/) (2025)
- [ScIRGen: Synthesize Realistic and Large-Scale RAG Dataset for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11117/) (2025)
- [NRFormer: Nationwide Nuclear Radiation Forecasting with Spatio-Temporal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11924/) (2024)
- [How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04908/) (2025)
- [Physics-Informed Teleconnection-Aware Transformer for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08049/) (2025)
- [Simple and Efficient Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18467/) (2025)
- [DSFNet: Learning Dual-Domain Spectral Operators for Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting in Urban Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07695/) (2026)
- [A2TTA: Anchored-and-Agile Test-Time Adaptation for Evolving Traffic Sensor Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25875/) (2026)
- [Neural Architecture Search for Traffic Prediction: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26467/) (2026)
- [Just for FUNS: LLM-Guided Spatio-Temporal Graph Node Generation for Forecasting Unobserved Node States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08818/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal forecasting is a critical component of various smart city applications, such as transportation optimization, energy management, and socio-economic analysis. Recently, several automated spatio-temporal forecasting methods have been proposed to automatically search the optimal neural network architecture for capturing complex spatio-temporal dependencies. However, the existing automated approaches suffer from expensive neural architecture search overhead, which hinders their practical use and the further exploration of diverse spatio-temporal operators in a finer granularity. In this paper, we propose AutoSTF, a decoupled automatic neural architecture search framework for cost-effective automated spatio-temporal forecasting. From the efficiency perspective, we first decouple the mixed search space into temporal space and spatial space and respectively devise representation compression and parameter-sharing schemes to mitigate the parameter explosion. The decoupled spatio-temporal search not only expedites the model optimization process but also leaves new room for more effective spatio-temporal dependency modeling. From the effectiveness perspective, we propose a multi-patch transfer module to jointly capture multi-granularity temporal dependencies and extend the spatial search space to enable finer-grained layer-wise spatial dependency search. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate the superiority of AutoSTF in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, our proposed method achieves up to 13.48x speed-up compared to state-of-the-art automatic spatio-temporal forecasting methods while maintaining the best forecasting accuracy.