# UniSTD: Towards Unified Spatio-Temporal Learning across Diverse Disciplines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20748/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04681/) (2015)
- [Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18814/) (2024)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [MCVD: Masked Conditional Video Diffusion for Prediction, Generation, and Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09853/) (2022)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [UberNet: Training a `Universal' Convolutional Neural Network for Low-, Mid-, and High-Level Vision using Diverse Datasets and Limited Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02132/) (2016)

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

- [Charting Empirical Laws for LLM Fine-Tuning in Scientific Multi-Discipline Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11215/) (2026)
- [UrbanFM: Scaling Urban Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20677/) (2026)
- [Global-Scale Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Learning for NDVI Time-Series Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02322/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional spatiotemporal models generally rely on task-specific architectures, which limit their generalizability and scalability across diverse tasks due to domain-specific design requirements. In this paper, we introduce UniSTD, a unified Transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal modeling, which is inspired by advances in recent foundation models with the two-stage pretraining-then-adaption paradigm. Specifically, our work demonstrates that task-agnostic pretraining on 2D vision and vision-text datasets can build a generalizable model foundation for spatiotemporal learning, followed by specialized joint training on spatiotemporal datasets to enhance task-specific adaptability. To improve the learning capabilities across domains, our framework employs a rank-adaptive mixture-of-expert adaptation by using fractional interpolation to relax the discrete variables so that can be optimized in the continuous space. Additionally, we introduce a temporal module to incorporate temporal dynamics explicitly. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale dataset covering 10 tasks across 4 disciplines, demonstrating that a unified spatiotemporal model can achieve scalable, cross-task learning and support up to 10 tasks simultaneously within one model while reducing training costs in multi-domain applications. Code will be available at https://github.com/1hunters/UniSTD.