# Atmospheric Diffusion-Guided Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Nuclear Radiation Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24774/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08895/) (2020)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02186/) (2022)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Non-stationary Transformers: Exploring the Stationarity in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14415/) (2022)
- [Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07719/) (2021)
- [TFB: Towards Comprehensive and Fair Benchmarking of Time Series Forecasting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20150/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Data Mining: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04928/) (2019)
- [Spatial-Temporal Identity: A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05233/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Predictive Learning in Urban Computing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14483/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09112/) (2022)
- [Koopa: Learning Non-stationary Time Series Dynamics with Koopman Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18803/) (2023)
- [AirFormer: Predicting Nationwide Air Quality in China with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15979/) (2022)
- [Towards Spatio-Temporal Aware Traffic Time Series Forecasting--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15737/) (2022)
- [AutoCTS: Automated Correlated Time Series Forecasting -- Extended Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11174/) (2021)
- [AirPhyNet: Harnessing Physics-Guided Neural Networks for Air Quality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03784/) (2024)
- [LightCTS: A Lightweight Framework for Correlated Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11974/) (2023)
- [NRFormer: Nationwide Nuclear Radiation Forecasting with Spatio-Temporal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11924/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nuclear radiation, the energy released during atomic decay, poses persistent risks to public health and the environment, and concerns have only grown since the Fukushima accident and the recent commencement of treated-water discharge. Modern monitoring networks now record radiation levels and accompanying weather conditions at thousands of stations, opening the door to nationwide forecasting that can inform emergency response, agricultural advisories, and routine public-safety decisions. However, turning this abundance of monitoring data into reliable forecasts is difficult for three reasons. First, the time series at each station are highly non-stationary, shaped by radioactive decay, weather variability, and irregular human interventions. Second, monitoring stations are severely unevenly distributed in space. Roughly 78% of Japan's stations sit in less than 6% of the country, clustered near Fukushima, which breaks the assumptions of standard graph-based models. Third, radiation co-evolves with heterogeneous context such as wind, temperature, and humidity through atmospheric transport processes that purely data-driven models struggle to capture from observations alone. In this study, we introduce NRFormer+, a spatio-temporal Transformer for nationwide nuclear radiation forecasting. NRFormer+ couples non-stationary temporal attention and density-adaptive spatial attention with a new atmospheric diffusion module that estimates how meteorology drives radiation dispersion and injects this physical signal into the network as an architectural prior. NRFormer+ delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on both datasets across all 13 baselines, reducing sudden-change MAE by up to 19.1% over the strongest baseline at comparable inference latency. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/tfeilyu/NRFormer_Plus.