State-Space and Multi-Scale Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Long-sequence traffic flow forecasting plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing Transformer-based approaches face a quadratic complexity bottleneck in computation and are prone to over-smoothing in deep architectures. This results in overly averaged predictions that fail to capture the peaks and troughs of traffic flow. To address these issues, we propose a State-Space Generative Adversarial Network (SSGAN) with a state-space generator and a multi-scale convolutional discriminator. Specifically, a bidirectional Mamba-2 model was designed as the generator to leverage the linear complexity and efficient forecasting capability of state-space models for long-sequence modeling. Meanwhile, the discriminator incorporates a multi-scale convolutional structure to extract traffic features from the frequency domain, thereby capturing flow patterns across different scales, alleviating the over-smoothing issue and enhancing discriminative ability. Through adversarial training, the model is able to better approximate the true distribution of traffic flow. Experiments conducted on four real-world public traffic flow datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperformed the baselines in both forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency.