Scalable Pre-Training of Compact Urban Spatio-Temporal Predictive Models on Large-Scale Multi-Domain Data

Spatio-Temporal Prediction (STP) is crucial for various smart city applications, such as traffic management and resource allocation. However, training samples can be scarce in data-constrained scenarios, which often degrades the predictive capability of existing deep STP models. Although recent STP foundation models excel in few-shot and zero-shot learning through extensive pre-training on large-scale, multi-domain spatio-temporal data, they often rely on large parameter scale to achieve enhanced performance, resulting in high computational demands that hinder practical deployment. In response, we develop CompactST, an efficient, compact, and versatile pre-trained model for STP in data-scarce settings. Recognizing the complexities posed by large-scale, heterogeneous pre-training datasets, CompactST integrates three specialized components: (1) a mixture-of-normalizers module to address domain and spatial heterogeneity, (2) a multi-scale spatio-temporal mixer that captures diverse patterns from datasets with varying spatio-temporal resolutions, and (3) an adaptive dataset-oriented tuning module that transfers the handling of dataset-specific parameters from pre-training to fine-tuning stage. These tailored designs enable CompactST to maximize generalizability across diverse datasets while maintaining a compact model size ( i.e. , only 300K parameters). To validate its effectiveness, we pre-train CompactST on a substantial corpus of public spatio-temporal datasets spanning over 10 domains and encompassing 300 million data points. Extensive experimental results on ten real-world datasets demonstrate CompactST's significantly improved prediction accuracy and efficiency in data-scarce scenarios.