arXiv:2607.12462cs.AI2026-07

简单全局聚合比自适应注意力更有效,且计算成本更低。

Do We Really Need Adaptive Global Spatial Attention for Traffic Forecasting?

  • 用统一全局混合替代自适应注意力模块,仅改变空间混合方式。
  • 在6个交通数据集上,简单聚合比注意力方法误差降低1.58%至升高1.26%。
  • 自适应注意力残差效果依赖数据集,无普适优势,适合追求高效模型者。

现有交通预测模型普遍关注提取空间依赖关系,尤其是全局空间信息,即节点间跨网络的交互表示。然而,全局信息的建模与提取机制仍不明确。是否必须通过高自由度自适应注意力来获取全局信息,或可由简单的全局聚合操作实现,尚不清楚。为此,我们设计了一个受控消融框架,仅替换空间混合模块以测试基于注意力的全局交互。在六个交通基准上,标准空间注意力相对于均匀全范围混合的相对MAE变化为-1.58%至+1.26%,未表现出一致优势;而均匀全范围混合将节点级空间混合复杂度从O(N²)降至O(N)。我们进一步提出假设模型,将空间注意力分解为行均匀的全局背景与非均匀残差。残差表现具有数据集依赖性。总体而言,均匀全范围混合提供了强有力的全局空间基线,而非均匀注意力残差在不同数据集上并非始终有益。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Existing traffic forecasting models commonly focus on extracting spatial dependencies, particularly global spatial information, which characterizes the representations obtained through interactions between each node and all nodes across the traffic network. However, the underlying mechanism by which global information is modeled and extracted remains insufficiently investigated. Whether global information must be extracted by high-degree-of-freedom adaptive attention or can be captured by a simple global aggregation operator remains unclear. For this purpose, we design a controlled ablation framework that replaces only the spatial mixing module to test attention-based global interaction. Across six traffic benchmarks, standard spatial attention yields relative MAE changes of $-1.58\%$ to $+1.26\%$ compared with uniform full-range mixing, and we observe no consistent advantage for standard spatial attention, while uniform full-range mixing reduces node-scale spatial-mixing complexity from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N)$. We further propose a hypothesized model that decomposes spatial attention into a row-uniform global background and a non-uniform residual. The residual shows dataset-dependent effects. Overall, uniform full-range mixing provides a strong global spatial baseline, while the non-uniform attention residual is not consistently beneficial across datasets.

交通预测注意力机制模型简化

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