STLLM-DF: A Spatial-Temporal Large Language Model with Diffusion for Enhanced Multi-Mode Traffic System Forecasting

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) presents challenges, particularly with missing data in multi-modal transportation and the complexity of handling diverse sequential tasks within a centralized framework. To address these issues, we propose the Spatial-Temporal LLM Diffusion (STLLM-DF), an innovative model that leverages Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and LLMs to improve multi-task transportation prediction. The DDPM's robust denoising capabilities enable it to recover underlying data patterns from noisy inputs, making it particularly effective in complex transportation systems. Meanwhile, the non-pretrained LLM dynamically adapts to spatial-temporal relationships within multi-modal networks, allowing the system to efficiently manage diverse transportation tasks in both long-term and short-term predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STLLM-DF consistently outperforms existing models, achieving an average reduction of 2.40\% in MAE, 4.50\% in RMSE, and 1.51\% in MAPE. This model significantly advances centralized ITS by enhancing predictive accuracy, robustness, and overall system performance across multiple tasks, thus paving the way for more effective spatio-temporal traffic forecasting through the integration of frozen transformer LLMs and diffusion techniques.