Get Rid of Isolation: A Continuous Multi-task Spatio-Temporal Learning Framework

Spatiotemporal learning has become a pivotal technique to enable urban intelligence. Traditional spatiotemporal models mostly focus on a specific task by assuming a same distribution between training and testing sets. However, given that urban systems are usually dynamic, multi-sourced with imbalanced data distributions, current specific task-specific models fail to generalize to new urban conditions and adapt to new domains without explicitly modeling interdependencies across various dimensions and types of urban data. To this end, we argue that there is an essential to propose a Continuous Multi-task Spatio-Temporal learning framework (CMuST) to empower collective urban intelligence, which reforms the urban spatiotemporal learning from single-domain to cooperatively multi-dimensional and multi-task learning. Specifically, CMuST proposes a new multi-dimensional spatiotemporal interaction network (MSTI) to allow cross-interactions between context and main observations as well as self-interactions within spatial and temporal aspects to be exposed, which is also the core for capturing task-level commonality and personalization. To ensure continuous task learning, a novel Rolling Adaptation training scheme (RoAda) is devised, which not only preserves task uniqueness by constructing data summarization-driven task prompts, but also harnesses correlated patterns among tasks by iterative model behavior modeling. We further establish a benchmark of three cities for multi-task spatiotemporal learning, and empirically demonstrate the superiority of CMuST via extensive evaluations on these datasets. The impressive improvements on both few-shot streaming data and new domain tasks against existing SOAT methods are achieved. Code is available at https://github.com/DILab-USTCSZ/CMuST.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer xkVJ5/10 · confidence 3/52024-06-23

Summary

This work proposed a novel spatiotemporal learning framework CMuST. In CMuST, MSTI is devised to dissect complex multi-dimension data correlations, to reveal disentangled patterns. And RoAda is proposed to extract the task-wise consistency and task-specific diversity. In addition, this paper introduce a benchmark of three cities for multi-task spatiotemporal learning, and empirically demonstrate the superiority of CMuST via extensive evaluations on these datasets.

Strengths

1. The paper achieves the best or second-best results in most experiments, validating the feasibility of the proposed method. 2. The paper proposes a continuous learning mechanism that enables the model to continuously learn from tasks. As claimed by the paper, it is "the first continuous multi-task spatiotemporal learning framework, CMuST, to jointly model learning tasks in the same spatiotemporal domain."

Weaknesses

1. The paper considers one of its major contributions to be the proposal of a benchmark. However, after reviewing the code, it seems that the authors did not provide details on how they processed the data. 2. The proposed MTSI module largely uses the Attention module from Transformers, but the authors did not provide any references to Transformers. Additionally, using the attention mechanism to capture relationships is a relatively straightforward design and lacks significant innovation. 3. One of the main problems this paper addresses is the cold start problem for new tasks. However, the paper still involves task-specific refinement, i.e., training is still required. Perhaps the superiority of the proposed module can be validated by comparing the adaptation time to new tasks. 4. In the experiments conducted by the authors, it can be observed that when the number of tasks is one, the model's performance is not superior to many models. This might indicate that the proposed MTSI module is not sufficiently effective. 5. The authors use a simple layer to obtain task summarization $S$. Compared to common designs in many MAEs, using just a linear layer with an activation function seems somewhat simplistic for MAE.

Questions

Please explain each weaknesses.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

1

Limitations

This paper adequately addressed the limitations.

Reviewer GaXf6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-03

Summary

This paper proposes a Continuous Multi-task Spatio-Temporal Learning Framework CMuST to facilitate the task-level cooperation in spatiotemporal predictions (mainly for traffic related tasks). The model is composed of three components . Data representation and integration module processes and standardizes diverse urban data into a harmonized format. MSTI modules reduce the complex interactions within spatiotemporal data. RoAda modules iteratively captures the task-wise consistency and task-specific diversity. This study is generally fine with a relatively novel method for spatiotemporal multi-task learning through prompting (although prompting studies in this field is being rapidly developed). The main contribution is how the prompting is handled. The main problem I found is that the text is not that easy to follow with many jargons, coined (complicated) phrases, e.g., continuous multi-task spatiotemporal learning is a bit confusing - is it something related to continual (lifelong) learning?

Strengths

S1: The paper provides open access to data and code. S2: The paper introduces the first continuous multi-task spatio-temporal learning framework for joint modeling of tasks within the same spatio-temporal domain, which is generally a novel method. S3: The paper validates the proposed model on multiple datasets and tasks, demonstrating its generalization ability.

Weaknesses

W1: During the model construction process, the paper does not clearly address the inconsistency issue of feature C across different task data. It is recommended to provide detailed explanations either in the data preprocessing stage or within the "Data representation and integration module" of the model. W2: For continuous task rolling, specific operational details of each task model from training to convergence (such as the number of epochs) are not mentioned in the paper. W3: Typos such as "Compressedd" (line 235). W4: Modify proprietary terms that lack detailed explanations, such as "PECPM" on line 124. Overall, the paper falls short in its presentation. Hope that it could be revised to ease the understanding.

Questions

Q1: The definition of "domain" in the paper appears somewhat ambiguous. Please clarify whether "domain" refers to different types of tasks (such as "pick up" vs. "drop off") or different geographical regions (such as "NYC" vs. "SIP"). Q2: Please explain the distinction between the symbols "H[. . . ,slice(s)]" and "Es". Currently, these two parts appear to belong to the same content. Q3. For different tasks in the same city, are the input features the same?

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes

Reviewer SHU97/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-08

Summary

This paper proposes a Continuous Multi-task Spatio-Temporal learning framework (CMuST) to enhance urban intelligence. CMuST introduces a Multi-dimensional Spatio-Temporal Interaction network (MSTI) for capturing complex data interactions and a Rolling Adaptation training scheme (RoAda) to iteratively update the model, simultaneously maintaining task uniqueness and leveraging shared patterns across tasks. The framework is validated through extensive experiments on datasets from three cities, demonstrating superior performance against existing methods.

Strengths

S1. Well presentation. This paper is well-presented and well-organized, providing a clear and comprehensive overview of the proposed methods and their implications. S2. Good significance. The proposed CMuST can jointly model different tasks of spatiotemporal forecasting within the same spatiotemporal domain. This approach not only reinforces individual correlated tasks from a collective perspective, but also helps understand the cooperative mechanism within the dynamic spatiotemporal system. S3. Sufficient and qualified technical contribution. The contribution and innovation of MSTI network lies in that effectively dissecting interactions across multiple data dimensions for improved spatiotemporal representation and commonality extraction, and RoAda training scheme for ensuring model to adapt to new tasks and continuously learn commonality and personalized patterns. The coupling of these two major components can well contribute to the ST learning field. S4. New benchmark construction and good experiment designs. The construction of benchmark datasets for three cities enriches the research field and provides a solid foundation for evaluating the framework performance. Extensive experiment designs including robustness in data-scarce scenarios, visualized attention scores, and performance variation with task increasing, demonstrate the framework's superiority in enhancing individual tasks with limited data and providing insights into task-wise continuous learning.

Weaknesses

1. In Section 4.4, there is missing detailed description on how to avoid catastrophic forgetting during task rolling adaptation. It would be beneficial if the authors could provide more experimental details in this regard. 2. Lacking comparison baselines. More baselines which are argued for unified spatiotemporal/time series learning, such as UniST, UniTime should be added for comparisons.

Questions

1. In your CMuST, how can you avoid catastrophic forgetting during task rolling adaptation? 2. Do more comparison experiments with SOTA baselines will be better.

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Soundness

4

Presentation

3

Contribution

4

Limitations

The limitations are discussed.

Reviewer YiFX5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-13

Summary

This work proposes a multi-task spatiotemporal learning framework that helps the model understand the relationships between multiple tasks. The specific contributions lie in proposing MSTI to model the multidimensional spatiotemporal data and RoAda to capture the commonality and personalization among multiple tasks.

Strengths

1. The author attempts to construct a spatiotemporal model for continuous multi-tasks, which is an attractive motivation with development potential. 2. RoAda provides an executable technical solution for spatiotemporal continuous learning.

Weaknesses

1. The author mentions multi-task and multi-domain problems several times in the introduction, but these concepts are not intuitively introduced in the paper. Multi-task and multi-domain do not always have a unified consensus in the ST community. For example, does multi-task include regression tasks and classification tasks? Does multi-domain refer to different cities or different modes of transportation? The author should provide more specific scopes for these terms in the introduction. 2. The author's method of handling ST dependencies is not novel. Using cross-attention techniques to model from the perspectives of temporal dimension, spatial dimension, and spatiotemporal relationships separately is a common processing paradigm in the ST community. The contribution of MSTI can be considered overstated. 3. The research on ST prediction and continual learning in the related work section is insufficient, lacking analysis of advanced ST prediction models and continual learning models in recent years. 4. The author argues that continual learning can help spatiotemporal models enhance generalization ability. The theory and experiments in the paper are insufficient to support this argument. 5. The author neglects experiments on cold start problems. 6. The comparative experiments did not achieve the best results on all tasks; reasons for this should be analyzed. Overall, I believe this work proposes a very attractive challenge, but in the end with the old problem, it only solves a standard problem, i.e. the ST multi-task problem. The author proposes Rolling Adaptation to solve this problem, which is a contribution that cannot be ignored. However, this work is incomplete for many issues mentioned in the introduction are not addressed, the definition of tasks is confusing at the beginning, and there is a lack of a pseudocode algorithm to help readers understand the proposed method more accurately.

Questions

1. Is the author using "continuous learning" to replace the commonly used "continual learning" in the community to indicate the uniqueness of this work? 2. Did the author train three models on three datasets, or train only one model and continuously update it on three datasets? In other words, the author provided definitions for temporal increment, spatial increment, and feature increment in Definition 3, but in the actual work, was the increase in spatial nodes ignored?

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The limitations have been addressed.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-07

Thanks for your positive feedback

Dear Reviewer xkVJ, We sincerely appreciate your constructive feedback and valuable comments, which really contributed to the enhancement of our manuscript. We will try our best to improve the quality of manuscript and make both codes and datasets open-sourced. Thanks very much! Authors of Paper 2077

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-07

Thanks for your support and thoughtful comments

Dear Reviewer GaXf, We sincerely thanks for your support and valuable comments of our work, which have played a great significant role in the quality of our manuscript. We will make our best efforts to improve the presentation of the manuscript and add corresponding experimental details, as well as make the code and dataset open source for reference and availability. We would appreciate it if you could give us your kind support during the discussion phase. Thank you very much. Authors of Paper 2077

Reviewer YiFX2024-08-07

Thank you for your response. I have raised the rating.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-08

Thanks for your constructive suggestion and positive feedback

Dear Reviewer YiFX, We would like to express our deeply gratitude to your professional reviews and useful suggestions for promoting our manuscript. We promise to polish our manuscript, by improving the readability, supplementing more related works, and providing additional experiments. Many thanks! Hope you a nice day! Authors of Paper 2077

Reviewer SHU92024-08-08

Thanks for the response. I have checked all the content and also my concerns are well-addressed. This work did address a new problem and contributed new techniques in the field of spatiotemporal learning. I would like to raise my score to 7.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-08

Thanks for your recognition and insightful suggestions

Dear Reviewer SHU9, Thank you for your recognition and valuable suggestions, we will carefully revise our manuscript, including adding more experimental details and baselines to further improve the quality for satisfying the high-level requirement of NeurIPS community. Thanks a lot! Authors of Paper 2077

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Thanks for your time on our manuscript

Dear AC and reviewers, We would like to express our great appreciation of your valuable time on our manuscript. As the deadline of reviewer-author discussion period is approaching, we wonder where there are any further questions on our work and we are always willing to resolve them, thus help better understanding of this work on a novel task-level continuous ST learning. We finally thank you all can support our work during the successive stages of discussions and we promise to public all the resources of this work including both datasets and codes if accepted. Sincere thanks! Authors of Paper 2077

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (oral)

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