# Deformable Dynamic Convolution for Accurate yet Efficient Spatio-Temporal Traffic Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11550/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08415/) (2019)
- [Recent Advances in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07108/) (2015)
- [Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00081/) (2016)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Predictive Learning in Urban Computing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14483/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Spatial-Temporal Similarity: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01254/) (2018)
- [Involution: Inverting the Inherence of Convolution for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06255/) (2021)
- [Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervised Learning for Traffic Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04475/) (2022)
- [DL-Traff: Survey and Benchmark of Deep Learning Models for Urban Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09091/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Large-Scale Graph Training: Benchmarking and Rethinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07494/) (2022)
- [SwinLSTM:Improving Spatiotemporal Prediction Accuracy using Swin Transformer and LSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09891/) (2023)
- [SimVPv2: Towards Simple yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12509/) (2022)
- [Kervolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03955/) (2019)
- [Traffic Prediction using Artificial Intelligence: Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19591/) (2023)
- [LSTTN: A Long-Short Term Transformer-based Spatio-temporal Neural Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16495/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traffic prediction is a critical component of intelligent transportation systems, enabling applications such as congestion mitigation and accident risk prediction. While recent research has explored both graph-based and grid-based approaches, key limitations remain. Graph-based methods effectively capture non-Euclidean spatial structures but often incur high computational overhead, limiting their practicality in large-scale systems. In contrast, grid-based methods, which primarily leverage Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), offer greater computational efficiency but struggle to model irregular spatial patterns due to the fixed shape of their filters. Moreover, both approaches often fail to account for inherent spatio-temporal heterogeneity, as they typically apply a shared set of parameters across diverse regions and time periods. To address these challenges, we propose the Deformable Dynamic Convolutional Network (DDCN), a novel CNN-based architecture that integrates both deformable and dynamic convolution operations. The deformable layer introduces learnable offsets to create flexible receptive fields that better align with spatial irregularities, while the dynamic layer generates region-specific filters, allowing the model to adapt to varying spatio-temporal traffic patterns. By combining these two components, DDCN effectively captures both non-Euclidean spatial structures and spatio-temporal heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that DDCN achieves competitive predictive performance while significantly reducing computational costs, underscoring its potential for large-scale and real-time deployment.