# Strada-LLM: Graph LLM for traffic prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20856 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20856/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [N-BEATS: Neural basis expansion analysis for interpretable time series forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10437/) (2019)
- [Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01728/) (2023)
- [One Fits All:Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11939/) (2023)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [MixHop: Higher-Order Graph Convolutional Architectures via Sparsified Neighborhood Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00067/) (2019)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Foundation Models for Time Series Analysis: A Tutorial and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14735/) (2024)
- [Spatial-Temporal Graph ODE Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12931/) (2021)
- [PromptCast: A New Prompt-based Learning Paradigm for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08964/) (2022)
- [Discrete Graph Structure Learning for Forecasting Multiple Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06861/) (2021)
- [High-Dimensional Multivariate Forecasting with Low-Rank Gaussian Copula Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03002/) (2019)
- [ETSformer: Exponential Smoothing Transformers for Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01381/) (2022)
- [UniTime: A Language-Empowered Unified Model for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09751/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting: Tutorial and Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10240/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards a Playground to Democratize Experimentation and Benchmarking of AI Agents for Network Troubleshooting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01997/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models in Transportation Systems Management and Operations: From Text Reasoning to Multi-modal Decision Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00991/) (2026)
- [Trustworthy Data- and ML-Ops for Intelligent Transportation Systems and Logistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01282/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic forecasting is pivotal for intelligent transportation systems, where accurate and interpretable predictions can significantly enhance operational efficiency and safety. A key challenge stems from the heterogeneity of traffic conditions across diverse locations, leading to highly varied traffic data distributions. Large language models (LLMs) show exceptional promise for few-shot learning in such dynamic and data-sparse scenarios. However, existing LLM-based solutions often rely on prompt-tuning, which can struggle to fully capture complex graph relationships and spatiotemporal dependencies-thereby limiting adaptability and interpretability in real-world traffic networks. We address these gaps by introducing Strada-LLM, a novel multivariate probabilistic forecasting LLM that explicitly models both temporal and spatial traffic patterns. By incorporating proximal traffic information as covariates, Strada-LLM more effectively captures local variations and outperforms prompt-based existing LLMs. To further enhance adaptability, we propose a lightweight distribution-derived strategy for domain adaptation, enabling parameter-efficient model updates when encountering new data distributions or altered network topologies-even under few-shot constraints. Empirical evaluations on spatio-temporal transportation datasets demonstrate that Strada-LLM consistently surpasses state-of-the-art LLM-driven and traditional GNN-based predictors. Specifically, it improves long-term forecasting by 17% in RMSE error and 16% more efficiency. Moreover, it maintains robust performance across different LLM backbones with minimal degradation, making it a versatile and powerful solution for real-world traffic prediction tasks.