# GLIDE: Graph-guided Leap Inference for Diffusion Estimation of Spatio-Temporal Point Processes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01273 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01273/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14491/) (2021)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [Autoregressive Denoising Diffusion Models for Multivariate Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12072/) (2021)
- [Transformer Hawkes Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09291/) (2020)
- [Neural Jump Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10403/) (2019)
- [Intensity-Free Learning of Temporal Point Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12127/) (2019)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [Fully Neural Network based Model for General Temporal Point Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09690/) (2019)
- [Accelerating Diffusion Models via Early Stop of the Diffusion Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12524/) (2022)
- [Neural Spatio-Temporal Point Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04583/) (2020)
- [DiffSTG: Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting with Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13629/) (2023)
- [Spatio-temporal Diffusion Point Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12403/) (2023)
- [Neural Point Process for Learning Spatiotemporal Event Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06351/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs) provide a principled framework for modeling asynchronous events in continuous time and space. Recent diffusion-based approaches offer a flexible alternative to deterministic prediction by modeling complex conditional distributions, but their application to STPPs remains challenging: reverse sampling from pure noise is costly, and weak structural constraints in sparse spatial domains can lead to poorly localized probability mass. We propose GLIDE (Graph-guided Leap Inference for Diffusion Estimation), a conditional diffusion framework for next-event modeling in STPPs. GLIDE organizes historical events into a multi-scale historical graph and encodes temporal evolution and spatial topology through a dual-stream architecture, yielding a structured conditioning context for a dual-branch diffusion denoiser. It further introduces a prior-guided leap inference mechanism, in which a lightweight mean predictor provides a deterministic anchor and the reverse process starts from an intermediate diffusion step instead of from pure Gaussian noise. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that GLIDE improves both distribution fitting and next-event prediction, with the largest gains appearing on the spatial side. The results also indicate that prior-guided leap inference substantially reduces reverse-sampling cost while preserving the stochastic generation capability of diffusion models.
