# Fine-Grained Traffic Inference from Road to Lane via Spatio-Temporal Graph Node Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [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 Graph ODE Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12931/) (2021)
- [MoFlow: An Invertible Flow Model for Generating Molecular Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10137/) (2020)
- [Syntax-Directed Variational Autoencoder for Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08786/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Meta-Graph Learning for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14701/) (2022)
- [Iterative Refinement Graph Neural Network for Antibody Sequence-Structure Co-design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04624/) (2021)
- [DiffSTG: Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting with Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13629/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Deep Graph Generation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06714/) (2022)
- [UrbanFM: Inferring Fine-Grained Urban Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.05377/) (2019)
- [Graph Residual Flow for Molecular Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13521/) (2019)
- [ST-MLP: A Cascaded Spatio-Temporal Linear Framework with Channel-Independence Strategy for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07496/) (2023)
- [Towards Unifying Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17360/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02318/) (2020)
- [Unifying Lane-Level Traffic Prediction from a Graph Structural Perspective: Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14941/) (2024)
- [MagiNet: Mask-Aware Graph Imputation Network for Incomplete Traffic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03511/) (2024)

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

- [Behavior-Grounded Lane Representation Learning for Multi-Task Traffic Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01901/) (2026)
- [DSFNet: Learning Dual-Domain Spectral Operators for Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting in Urban Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07695/) (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)

Fine-grained traffic management and prediction are fundamental to key applications such as autonomous driving, lane change guidance, and traffic signal control. However, obtaining lane-level traffic data has become a critical bottleneck for data-driven models due to limitations in the types and number of sensors and issues with the accuracy of tracking algorithms. To address this, we propose the Fine-grained Road Traffic Inference (FRTI) task, which aims to generate more detailed lane-level traffic information using limited road data, providing a more energy-efficient and cost-effective solution for precise traffic management. This task is abstracted as the first scene of the spatio-temporal graph node generation problem. We designed a two-stage framework--RoadDiff--to solve the FRTI task. solve the FRTI task. This framework leverages the Road-Lane Correlation Autoencoder-Decoder and the Lane Diffusion Module to fully utilize the limited spatio-temporal dependencies and distribution relationships of road data to accurately infer fine-grained lane traffic states. Based on existing research, we designed several baseline models with the potential to solve the FRTI task and conducted extensive experiments on six datasets representing different road conditions to validate the effectiveness of the RoadDiff model in addressing the FRTI task. The relevant datasets and code are available at https://github.com/ShuhaoLii/RoadDiff.