STPFormer: A State-of-the-Art Pattern-Aware Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract: Spatio-temporal traffic forecasting is challenging due to complex temporal patterns, dynamic spatial structures, and diverse input formats. Although Transformer-based models offer strong global modeling, they often struggle with rigid temporal encoding and weak space-time fusion. We propose STPFormer, a Spatio-Temporal Pattern-Aware Transformer that achieves state-of-the-art performance via unified and interpretable representation learning. It integrates four modules: Temporal Position Aggregator (TPA) for pattern-aware temporal encoding, Spatial Sequence Aggregator (SSA) for sequential spatial learning, Spatial-Temporal Graph Matching (STGM) for cross-domain alignment, and an Attention Mixer for multi-scale fusion. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that STPFormer consistently sets new SOTA results, with ablation and visualizations confirming its effectiveness and generalizability.