Vision-LLMs for Spatiotemporal Traffic Forecasting

Abstract: Accurate spatiotemporal traffic forecasting is a critical prerequisite for proactive resource management in dense urban mobile networks. While LLMs have shown promise in time series analysis, they inherently struggle to model the complex spatial dependencies of grid-based traffic data. Effectively extending LLMs to this domain is challenging, as representing the vast amount of information from dense geographical grids can be inefficient and overwhelm the model's context. To address these challenges, we propose ST-Vision-LLM, a novel framework that reframes spatiotemporal forecasting as a vision-language fusion problem. Our approach leverages a Vision-LLM visual encoder to process historical global traffic matrices as image sequences, providing the model with a comprehensive global view to inform cell-level predictions. To overcome the inefficiency of LLMs in handling numerical data, we introduce an efficient encoding scheme that represents floating-point values as single tokens via a specialized vocabulary, coupled with a two-stage numerical alignment fine-tuning process. The model is first trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and then further optimized for predictive accuracy using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a memory-efficient reinforcement learning method. Evaluations on real-world mobile traffic datasets demonstrate that ST-Vision-LLM outperforms existing methods by 15.6% in long-term prediction accuracy and exceeds the second-best baseline by over 30.04% in cross-domain few-shot scenarios. Our extensive experiments validate the model's strong generalization capabilities across various data-scarce environments.