$M^2Net$: Unifying Scale-Specific Structures and Prototype Decomposition for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting

Chengyang Zhou, Zijian Zhang, Hao Miao, Chunxu Zhang, Ziming Liu +3

Spatial-temporal forecasting is pivotal for intelligent urban management yet remains challenging due to the intricate coupling of spatial dynamics and temporal non-stationarity. Existing approaches, while effective, often overlook two fundamental characteristics of real-world data: (1) Granularity-dependence, where dominant spatial correlations shift significantly across different time scales, and (2) Signal entanglement, where global common patterns are inextricably mixed with node-specific disturbances. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named $M^2Net$ (Multi-Scale Masked attention and Prototype network) to unify scale-specific structural learning and semantic decomposition. First, to capture the evolution of spatial dependencies, we introduce a Multi-Scale Masked attention mechanism. By downsampling temporal features into multiple resolutions, we dynamically generate scale-adaptive spatial masks, allowing the model to distinguish between micro-scale physical neighbors and macro-scale functional correlations. Second, to disentangle unique variations from shared trends, we propose a Prototype Residual Learning module. It retrieves global common patterns from a…