EMAGN: Efficient Multi-Attention Graph Network via Learned Clustering for Scalable Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Mingxing Xu, Rakesh Chowdary Machineni, Ke Liu, Xi Cheng, Chengqi Lu, Xin Hu, Lyuhao Chen, Xiangyu Li, +2 more
Organizations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor · University of California, Berkeley · Cornell University · Technische Universität Dresden · Carnegie Mellon University · The University of Texas at Austin · University of Wisconsin–Madison
Traffic forecasting is highly challenging due to complex and nonlinear spatial and temporal dependencies. Self-attention mechanisms have been widely adopted to model dynamic and long-range dependencies, achieving state-of-the-art performance, but suffer from limited scalability due to quadratic computational and memory complexity. To address this, we propose an Efficient Multi-Attention Graph Network (EMAGN) that linearises the spatial attention mechanism itself, inspired by the theory of fast high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. Two learned clustering matrices C_k and C_v adaptively group key and value vectors into M super-clusters, reducing complexity from O(N^2 d) to O(NMd) without sacrificing the flexibility of attention for dynamic dependency modelling. Experimental results on PEMS-BAY and METR-LA show that EMAGN achieves accuracy within 2.7-3.2% MAE of full-attention GMAN while reducing training time by 32%, inference time by 38%, and GPU memory by 58%. Critically, at K=16 attention heads, full-attention GMAN runs out of memory on a standard 11 GB GPU entirely while EMAGN continues to operate, demonstrating a categorical expansion of feasible model configurations. EMAGN also surpasses Linformer and Performer in both accuracy and efficiency within the same backbone, owing to its traffic-network-aware adaptive clustering.
Traffic forecasting is a significant part of intelligent transportation systems. One of the critical challenges of traffic forecasting is to find spatio-temporal correlations. In recent years, graph convolutional networks and graph attention networks have replaced traditional statistical models to predict future traffic. However, it is complicated for both of them to allow vertices to have far different characters. To address this, we propose the Global-Local Graph Attention Network (GLGAT) with pairwise encoding and the event-based adjacency matrix. The GLGAT allows vertices to have a global attention matrix set for the whole graph and assigns local attention matrix sets to each vertex. Experiments on two real-world traffic datasets show that GLGAT can effectively capture spatio-temporal correlations and has competitive performance against other state-of-the-art baselines.
Predicting traffic flow is crucial to optimizing transportation systems and improving urban mobility. Many graph convolution-based models have been proposed to extract spatial-temporal features and predict traffic flow. However, most focus on spatial-temporal and semantic correlation in topological relationships. There are two primary problems to address. Firstly, the convolutional structure in the model focuses on utilizing static spatial dependencies and spatial-temporal relationships in topological structures, while neglecting the different information propagation delays between adjacent nodes in the convolution. Secondly, these methods often stack a large number of complex structures, resulting in a substantial increase in computational time during the model training phase, thereby disregarding the model's requirements for timeliness. In this paper, we propose a novel network called the Attention-Based Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Convolution Network (A-STFGCN). We design a spatial-temporal fusion block to extract the spatial-temporal feature correlations with propagation delay errors removed and to capture both long-term and short-term temporal characteristics of the data within a multi-head self-attention mechanism based on a mask matrix. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the best overall performance while having good computation and data utilization efficiency compared with the eight baseline methods.
Accurate traffic forecasting is essential for intelligent transportation systems, supporting a wide range of real-world applications. However, it remains challenging due to two key factors:(1) Traffic series contain heterogeneous temporal patterns, where stable periodic regularities coexist with event-driven fluctuations. Existing methods often treat them within a unified representation, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained temporal dynamics.(2)Spatial dependencies among nodes are inherently dynamic and sparse, while dense all-pairs attention often introduces redundant interactions and amplifies noise. To address these issues, we propose ADMFormer, an Adaptive-Decomposition Transformer with Time-Varying Masked Spatial Attention. Specifically, ADMFormer first employs a time-node adaptive gating mechanism to decouple traffic signals into dominant regularities and residual fluctuations that vary across time and nodes. A dual-branch temporal module is then designed to separately capture global periodic dependencies and high-frequency irregular variations from these two decomposed components. Furthermore, ADMFormer introduces a time-varying masked spatial attention that sparsifies spatial interactions based on real-time traffic states, thereby effectively preserving dynamic and informative dependencies. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that ADMFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance.