# Spatiotemporal Multi-Task Graph Transformer for Trip-Level Transit Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00572 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00572/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Exploring Human Mobility for Multi-Pattern Passenger Prediction: A Graph Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10339/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Passenger count data from public transit systems reveals urban mobility patterns and is essential for planning, operation, and optimisation. However, non-linear spatiotemporal interdependencies across stops and lines make modelling and prediction challenging. Existing approaches often rely on fixed temporal, spatial, or stop-level formulations, limiting their ability to capture within-trip evolution and network context. This study proposes SMT-GraphFormer, a spatiotemporal multi-task graph transformer that frames trip-level transit prediction as sequence-to-sequence modelling. Given a line's stop sequence and trip-level context, the model predicts successive boarding and alighting counts, with delay and dwell time treated as encoder-side surrogate tasks. Key components include graph embeddings for multi-relational stop similarity, a context encoder for weather and temporal information, and a multi-gate mixture-of-experts module that produces task-specific decoder representations for boarding and alighting predictions. Evaluation on public bus transit data from Trondheim, Norway, shows that SMT-GraphFormer outperforms stop-level tabular benchmarks, with ablation studies examining each component's contribution. The sequential formulation yields substantial gains on alighting prediction (+0.24 in R2) and consistent improvements on boarding, delay, and dwell, confirming the value of explicit trip-level sequential bias and inter-target dependencies. These findings demonstrate the potential of transformer-based sequence modelling for capturing complex spatiotemporal dynamics in public transit and underscore the value of architectures tailored to transit data rather than off-the-shelf tabular models. The proposed framework provides a horizon-agnostic basis for scenario analysis in digital twin environments, supporting informed decision-making by planners and transit operators.