Enhancing Topological Dependencies in Spatio-Temporal Graphs with Cycle Message Passing Blocks
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in spatio-temporal graph modeling for applications like traffic prediction, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing GNN and Transformer methods.
The paper tackles the problem of limited topological dependency capture in spatio-temporal graphs by introducing Cy2Mixer, a novel GNN with a cycle message-passing block, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformer-based models have been increasingly adopted to learn the complex vector representations of spatio-temporal graphs, capturing intricate spatio-temporal dependencies crucial for applications such as traffic datasets. Although many existing methods utilize multi-head attention mechanisms and message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) to capture both spatial and temporal relations, these approaches encode temporal and spatial relations independently, and reflect the graph's topological characteristics in a limited manner. In this work, we introduce the Cycle to Mixer (Cy2Mixer), a novel spatio-temporal GNN based on topological non-trivial invariants of spatio-temporal graphs with gated multi-layer perceptrons (gMLP). The Cy2Mixer is composed of three blocks based on MLPs: A temporal block for capturing temporal properties, a message-passing block for encapsulating spatial information, and a cycle message-passing block for enriching topological information through cyclic subgraphs. We bolster the effectiveness of Cy2Mixer with mathematical evidence emphasizing that our cycle message-passing block is capable of offering differentiated information to the deep learning model compared to the message-passing block. Furthermore, empirical evaluations substantiate the efficacy of the Cy2Mixer, demonstrating state-of-the-art performances across various spatio-temporal benchmark datasets. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/leemingo/cy2mixer}.