Adaptive Frequency Pathways for Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Abstract

Spatiotemporal forecasting is a fundamental task in areas such as traffic flow prediction, environmental sensing, and urban planning. Recent advances have shown that decomposing temporal signals into multiple frequencies and modeling them jointly with spatial structures can significantly enhance forecasting performance. However, existing multifrequency forecasting models still face two critical limitations. First, the importance of different temporal frequencies evolves over time, yet most models assume fixed or static frequency contributions. Second, spatial dependencies are inherently frequency-sensitive. For instance, low-frequency components often align with global spatial patterns, while highfrequency components tend to correspond to localized interactions. However, current approaches typically use a shared spatial information across all frequencies, introducing spatiotemporal inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Adaptive Frequency Pathways (AdaFre) for spatiotemporal forecasting, which adaptively captures both dynamic frequency relevance and frequency-aligned spatial structures. AdaFre employs a multi-frequency routing mechanism to dynamically select and aggregate the most informative temporal frequency components, while associating each with its corresponding spatial representation derived from frequency-aware embeddings. Spatiotemporal backbones are then used to model each path independently before final aggregation. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that AdaFre significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.