AST-GNNFormer: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Layer-Aware Preservation for Traffic Flow Prediction
Article Information
Abstract
Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in intelligent transportation systems, providing essential support for urban planning, traffic control, and congestion mitigation. To address the challenges of spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics inherent in traffic data, this paper proposes AST-GNNFormer, an adaptive spatio-temporal graph neural network that integrates graph attention mechanisms with temporal convolution. The model introduces three key components to enhance predictive accuracy and generalization: (1) a Layer-aware Information Preservation mechanism that mitigates over-smoothing in deep GNNs by retaining original node features across layers; (2) an Inter-Layer Attention Module that dynamically selects and weights informative layer-wise features to improve multi-layer fusion quality; and (3) an Adaptive Graph Learning Module that fuses prior adjacency knowledge with learnable structures, enabling dynamic topology adaptation. Additionally, a Temporal Convolution Module is incorporated to model multi-scale temporal dependencies efficiently. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets (PEMS04 and PEMS08) demonstrate that AST-GNNFormer significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both short-term and long-term traffic forecasting tasks. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each proposed component.
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References
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Cite This Article
TY - JOUR AU - Zheng, Yusen AU - Jin, Xuebo PY - 2025 DA - 2025/10/26 TI - AST-GNNFormer: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Layer-Aware Preservation for Traffic Flow Prediction JO - ICCK Transactions on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence T2 - ICCK Transactions on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence JF - ICCK Transactions on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence VL - 2 IS - 4 SP - 203 EP - 219 DO - 10.62762/TETAI.2025.387543 UR - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TETAI.2025.387543 KW - graph neural network KW - traffic flow prediction KW - adaptive graph learning KW - inter-layer attention mechanism AB - Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in intelligent transportation systems, providing essential support for urban planning, traffic control, and congestion mitigation. To address the challenges of spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics inherent in traffic data, this paper proposes AST-GNNFormer, an adaptive spatio-temporal graph neural network that integrates graph attention mechanisms with temporal convolution. The model introduces three key components to enhance predictive accuracy and generalization: (1) a Layer-aware Information Preservation mechanism that mitigates over-smoothing in deep GNNs by retaining original node features across layers; (2) an Inter-Layer Attention Module that dynamically selects and weights informative layer-wise features to improve multi-layer fusion quality; and (3) an Adaptive Graph Learning Module that fuses prior adjacency knowledge with learnable structures, enabling dynamic topology adaptation. Additionally, a Temporal Convolution Module is incorporated to model multi-scale temporal dependencies efficiently. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets (PEMS04 and PEMS08) demonstrate that AST-GNNFormer significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both short-term and long-term traffic forecasting tasks. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each proposed component. SN - 3068-6652 PB - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge LA - English ER -
@article{Zheng2025ASTGNNForm,
author = {Yusen Zheng and Xuebo Jin},
title = {AST-GNNFormer: Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network with Layer-Aware Preservation for Traffic Flow Prediction},
journal = {ICCK Transactions on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence},
year = {2025},
volume = {2},
number = {4},
pages = {203-219},
doi = {10.62762/TETAI.2025.387543},
url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TETAI.2025.387543},
abstract = {Accurate traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in intelligent transportation systems, providing essential support for urban planning, traffic control, and congestion mitigation. To address the challenges of spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics inherent in traffic data, this paper proposes AST-GNNFormer, an adaptive spatio-temporal graph neural network that integrates graph attention mechanisms with temporal convolution. The model introduces three key components to enhance predictive accuracy and generalization: (1) a Layer-aware Information Preservation mechanism that mitigates over-smoothing in deep GNNs by retaining original node features across layers; (2) an Inter-Layer Attention Module that dynamically selects and weights informative layer-wise features to improve multi-layer fusion quality; and (3) an Adaptive Graph Learning Module that fuses prior adjacency knowledge with learnable structures, enabling dynamic topology adaptation. Additionally, a Temporal Convolution Module is incorporated to model multi-scale temporal dependencies efficiently. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets (PEMS04 and PEMS08) demonstrate that AST-GNNFormer significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both short-term and long-term traffic forecasting tasks. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each proposed component.},
keywords = {graph neural network, traffic flow prediction, adaptive graph learning, inter-layer attention mechanism},
issn = {3068-6652},
publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}
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