DETNO: A Diffusion-Enhanced Transformer Neural Operator for Long-Term Traffic Forecasting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ahmad, Owais, Ramezankhani, Milad, Deodhar, Anirudh
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ahmad, Owais
Ramezankhani, Milad
Deodhar, Anirudh
author_facet Ahmad, Owais
Ramezankhani, Milad
Deodhar, Anirudh
contents Accurate long-term traffic forecasting remains a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems, particularly when predicting high-frequency traffic phenomena such as shock waves and congestion boundaries over extended rollout horizons. Neural operators have recently gained attention as promising tools for modeling traffic flow. While effective at learning function space mappings, they inherently produce smooth predictions that fail to reconstruct high-frequency features such as sharp density gradients which results in rapid error accumulation during multi-step rollout predictions essential for real-time traffic management. To address these fundamental limitations, we introduce a unified Diffusion-Enhanced Transformer Neural Operator (DETNO) architecture. DETNO leverages a transformer neural operator with cross-attention mechanisms, providing model expressivity and super-resolution, coupled with a diffusion-based refinement component that iteratively reconstructs high-frequency traffic details through progressive denoising. This overcomes the inherent smoothing limitations and rollout instability of standard neural operators. Through comprehensive evaluation on chaotic traffic datasets, our method demonstrates superior performance in extended rollout predictions compared to traditional and transformer-based neural operators, preserving high-frequency components and improving stability over long prediction horizons.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DETNO: A Diffusion-Enhanced Transformer Neural Operator for Long-Term Traffic Forecasting
Ahmad, Owais
Ramezankhani, Milad
Deodhar, Anirudh
Machine Learning
Applications
Accurate long-term traffic forecasting remains a critical challenge in intelligent transportation systems, particularly when predicting high-frequency traffic phenomena such as shock waves and congestion boundaries over extended rollout horizons. Neural operators have recently gained attention as promising tools for modeling traffic flow. While effective at learning function space mappings, they inherently produce smooth predictions that fail to reconstruct high-frequency features such as sharp density gradients which results in rapid error accumulation during multi-step rollout predictions essential for real-time traffic management. To address these fundamental limitations, we introduce a unified Diffusion-Enhanced Transformer Neural Operator (DETNO) architecture. DETNO leverages a transformer neural operator with cross-attention mechanisms, providing model expressivity and super-resolution, coupled with a diffusion-based refinement component that iteratively reconstructs high-frequency traffic details through progressive denoising. This overcomes the inherent smoothing limitations and rollout instability of standard neural operators. Through comprehensive evaluation on chaotic traffic datasets, our method demonstrates superior performance in extended rollout predictions compared to traditional and transformer-based neural operators, preserving high-frequency components and improving stability over long prediction horizons.
title DETNO: A Diffusion-Enhanced Transformer Neural Operator for Long-Term Traffic Forecasting
topic Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19389