From XXLTraffic to EvoXXLTraffic: Scaling Traffic Forecasting to Sensor-Evolving Networks
Authors: Du Yin, Hao Xue, Arian Prabowo, Shuang Ao, Flora Salim
Organizations: University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Abstract
Existing traffic forecasting benchmarks assume a fixed sensor set, but real road-sensor networks grow continuously as the road network changes year by year. We introduce the XXLTraffic dataset family, which spans up to 27 years of California PeMS and Transport for NSW data. The fixed-sensor subsets of XXLTraffic support extremely long forecasting with multi-year gaps and standard hourly / daily long-horizon forecasting. We extend it to EvoXXLTraffic, a sensor-evolving reorganization that exposes per-year active sensors, yearly traffic-flow matrices, and yearly graph snapshots across nine PeMS districts, with growth ratios ranging from +305% to over +10,000%. We define a yearly streaming forecasting protocol on EvoXXLTraffic in which each calendar year is a continual task, and benchmark a wide range of representative baselines drawn from static spatio-temporal GNNs, naïve online schemes, evolving-graph continual methods, and retrieval / test-time methods. We find that our ultra-large evolutionary dataset better reflects the real world, and many state-of-the-art (SOTA) results no longer work. Our dataset complements existing benchmarks by enabling more realistic forecasting under ultra-long evolutionary road networks. Our code and baselines are available at github repo: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/TSAS26-EvoXXLTraffic
Traffic forecasting is important for efficient traffic management and route planning in smart cities. Existing traffic forecasting studies typically assume fixed sensor graphs, overlooking the continuous evolution of real-world traffic networks, e.g., ongoing road network construction and evolving human mobility patterns. These dynamic changes can substantially degrade conventional forecasting models, motivating test-time adaptation (TTA) to efficiently adapt pretrained models during deployment. However, applying TTA to evolving traffic sensor networks remains challenging in two aspects. First, topology expansion introduces new sensors and connections, continuously reshaping the sensor graph. Second, tem- poral shifts vary in time scale and stability, requiring differentiated adaptation to long-term and short-term shifts. In this study, we address these challenges by proposing A2TTA, an Anchored-and-Agile Test-Time Adaptation framework for evolving traffic sensor networks, which transforms topology-induced forecasting errors into an expandable output calibration problem and separates tem- poral adaptation into persistent global correction and agile context-specific specialization. By jointly addressing topology evolution and multi-scale temporal shifts, A2TTA enables efficient and robust adaptation to continuously evolving traffic environments. Extensive experiments on ten real-world traffic networks demonstrate that A2TTA consistently improves forecasting performance across different backbones, datasets, and prediction horizons. Our code is available in https://github.com/lixus7/A2TTA.
In recent years, the integration of non-topological space modeling with temporal learning methods has emerged as an effective approach for capturing spatio-temporal information in non-Euclidean graphs. However, most existing methods rely on static underlying graph structures, which are inadequate for capturing the continuously expanding and evolving patterns in streaming traffic networks. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet efficient dual-branch continual learning framework for traffic prediction, named CoMemNet. The fast-converging Online branch undertakes the primary prediction tasks, while the momentum-updated Target branch extracts historical information using Wasserstein Distance features to create a Dynamic Contrastive Sampler (DC Sampler). This sampler selects a node set with significant dynamic network feature changes for training, effectively mitigating the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, the backbone incorporates a lightweight Node-Adaptive Temporal Memory Buffer (TMRB-N) to consolidate old knowledge through memory replay and address the risk of memory explosion. Finally, we provide two newly curated open-source datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that CoMemNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all three large-scale real-world datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/meiwu5/CoMemNet.
Accurate traffic flow prediction is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems, playing a pivotal role in urban mobility optimization and smart city development. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) integrated with time series forecasting have emerged as promising solutions, two critical limitations persist: (1) the quadratic complexity of attention-based architectures hinders real-time deployment in large-scale networks, and (2) high-frequency noise in sensor data significantly degrades prediction reliability. These challenges are particularly acute in metropolitan scenarios where both computational efficiency and noise robustness are paramount. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{ButterMamba}, a novel and efficient framework based on State Space Models (SSMs). ButterMamba consists of two key components: (1) a Butterworth Spectral Filtering module that preprocesses the data by removing high-frequency noise, allowing the model to focus on significant underlying trends, and (2) a Spatial-Temporal State Mixer that uses a parallel Mamba architecture to efficiently capture both long-range temporal dependencies and complex spatial correlations across the road network. By decoupling noise filtering from spatial-temporal modeling, ButterMamba achieves superior predictive accuracy with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that ButterMamba not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy but also considerably reduces training time and memory usage.