Robust Spatio-Temporal Centralized Interaction for OOD Learning

Abstract

Recently, spatiotemporal graph convolutional networks have achieved dominant performance in spatiotemporal prediction tasks. However, most models relying on node-to-node messaging interaction exhibit sensitivity to spatiotemporal shifts, encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) challenges. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{\underline{S}}patio-\textbf{\underline{T}}emporal \textbf{\underline{O}}OD \textbf{\underline{P}}rocessor (STOP), which employs a centralized messaging mechanism along with a message perturbation mechanism to facilitate robust spatiotemporal interactions. Specifically, the centralized messaging mechanism integrates Context-Aware Units for coarse-grained spatiotemporal feature interactions with nodes, effectively blocking traditional node-to-node messages. We also implement a message perturbation mechanism to disrupt this messaging process, compelling the model to extract generalizable contextual features from generated variant environments. Finally, we customize a spatiotemporal distributionally robust optimization approach that exposes the model to challenging environments, thereby further enhancing its generalization capabilities. Compared with 14 baselines across six datasets, STOP achieves up to \textbf{17.01\%} improvement in generalization performance and \textbf{18.44\%} improvement in inductive learning performance. The code is available at https://github.com/PoorOtterBob/STOP.