PFGNet: A Fully Convolutional Frequency-Guided Peripheral Gating Network for Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning

Spatiotemporal predictive learning aims to forecast future frames from historical observations in an unsupervised manner, and is critical to a wide range of applications. The key challenge is to model long-range dynamics while preserving high-frequency details for sharp multi-step predictions. Existing efficient recurrent-free frameworks typically rely on strided convolutions or pooling for sampling, which tends to discard textures and boundaries, while purely spatial operators often struggle to balance local interactions with global propagation. To address these issues, we propose WaveSFNet, an efficient framework that unifies a wavelet-based codec with a spatial--frequency dual-domain gated spatiotemporal translator. The wavelet-based codec preserves high-frequency subband cues during downsampling and reconstruction. Meanwhile, the translator first injects adjacent-frame differences to explicitly enhance dynamic information, and then performs dual-domain gated fusion between large-kernel spatial local modeling and frequency-domain global modulation, together with gated channel interaction for cross-channel feature exchange. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WaveSFNet achieves competitive prediction accuracy on Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, and WeatherBench, while maintaining low computational complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhjdqaq/WaveSFNet.

Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

Video prediction requires models to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies and to retain relevant information over long sequences. PredRNN and its successor PredRNN-V2 address this challenge with spatiotemporal Long Short-Term Memory (ST-LSTM) units that maintain two separate memory states, at the cost of a relatively complex recurrent building block. In this work, we investigate whether the simpler gating of Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) can be transferred to spatiotemporal predictive learning. To this end, we develop a spatiotemporal GRU (ST-GRU) unit as a GRU-based alternative to the ST-LSTM. The ST-GRU replaces the ST-LSTM's three gates per memory state with two GRU-style gates (update and reset), and merges the temporal memory state into the hidden state, which reduces the number of parameters by about 5%. We incorporate the ST-GRU into PredRNN-V2 and evaluate the resulting model on the Moving MNIST video prediction benchmark, following the original experimental protocol. Averaged over ten predicted frames, the ST-GRU-based PredRNN-V2 achieves an MSE of 55.1, an SSIM of 0.883, an LPIPS of 0.065 and a PSNR of 19.53dB. It does not surpass the original ST-LSTM-based PredRNN-V2 on MSE, SSIM or PSNR, but it achieves a lower LPIPS and performs on par with the earlier ST-LSTM-based PredRNN, while using a simpler recurrent cell. These results suggest that ST-GRUs are a promising building block for spatiotemporal predictive learning and motivate further work on their design and integration.