Paper Detail

U-STS-LLM A Unified Spatio-Temporal Steered Large Language Model for Traffic Prediction and Imputation

Yichen Zhang, Jun Li

arxiv Score 8.3

Published 2026-05-12 · First seen 2026-05-13

General AI

Abstract

The efficient operation of modern cellular networks hinges on the accurate analysis of spatio-temporal traffic data. Mastering these patterns is essential for core network functions, chiefly forecasting future load to pre-empt congestion and imputing missing values caused by sensor failures or transmission errors to ensure data continuity. While deeply connected, forecasting and imputation have historically evolved as separate sub-fields. The dominant paradigm, Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs), while effective, are often specialized, computationally intensive, and exhibit limited generalization. Concurrently, adapting large pre-trained language models (LLMs) offers a powerful alternative for sequence modeling, yet existing approaches provide weak structural guidance, leading to unstable convergence and a narrow focus on forecasting. To bridge these gaps, we propose U-STS-LLM, a unified framework built on a spatio-temporally steered LLM. Our core innovation is a Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Attention Bias Generator that synthesizes a persistent functional graph with transient nodal states to explicitly steer the LLM's attention. Coupled with a partially frozen backbone tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and a Gated Adaptive Fusion mechanism, the model achieves stable, parameter-efficient adaptation. Trained under a unified multi-task objective, U-STS-LLM learns a holistic data representation. Extensive experiments on real-world cellular datasets demonstrate that U-STS-LLM establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both long-horizon forecasting and high-missing-rate imputation, while maintaining remarkable training efficiency and stability, offering a novel blueprint for harnessing foundation models in structured, non-linguistic domains.

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BibTeX

@article{zhang2026u,
  title = {U-STS-LLM A Unified Spatio-Temporal Steered Large Language Model for Traffic Prediction and Imputation},
  author = {Yichen Zhang and Jun Li},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {The efficient operation of modern cellular networks hinges on the accurate analysis of spatio-temporal traffic data. Mastering these patterns is essential for core network functions, chiefly forecasting future load to pre-empt congestion and imputing missing values caused by sensor failures or transmission errors to ensure data continuity. While deeply connected, forecasting and imputation have historically evolved as separate sub-fields. The dominant paradigm, Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Netwo},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11735},
  keywords = {cs.LG, eess.SP},
  eprint = {2605.11735},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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