ST-MAFNet: Spatio-Temporal Multi-Scale Adaptive Fusion Network for Traffic Forecasting

Accurate traffic flow prediction is fundamental to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), critical for transportation management and logistics. Despite advances in spatio-temporal prediction methods, existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: (i) multi-scale fusion methods inadequately capture hierarchical constraints between cross-scale features, and (ii) models rely on single spatio-temporal views, neglecting multi-source relationship complementarity. To address these issues, we propose ST-MAFNet, a spatio-temporal multi-scale adaptive fusion network comprising three key components, specifically, a Cross-Scale Hierarchical Anchoring strategy (CSHA) that anchors short-term predictions with multi-scale temporal patterns to mitigate noise; a Dual Spatial Perception Module (DSPM) that learns node heterogeneity and dynamic correlations through node embeddings and adaptive graph attention; and a Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Fusion Module (STAFM) that captures time-varying connectivity by integrating multi-scale temporal features with multi-source spatial relationships. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that ST-MAFNet is particularly effective for short-term traffic forecasting. Compared with the best previously reported MAE results, ST-MAFNet reduces MAE by 2.95%, 1.43%, 1.25%, and 0.37% on PEMS03, PEMS04, PEMS07, and PEMS08, respectively, and achieves the best or second-best performance on most evaluation metrics.