POLLA: Enhancing the Local Structure Awareness in Long Sequence Spatial-temporal Modeling

Abstract

The spatial-temporal modeling on long sequences is of great importance in many real-world applications. Recent studies have shown the potential of applying the self-attention mechanism to improve capturing the complex spatial-temporal dependencies. However, the lack of underlying structure information weakens its general performance on long sequence spatial-temporal problem. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a novel method, named the Proximity-aware Long Sequence Learning framework, and apply it to the spatial-temporal forecasting task. The model substitutes the canonical self-attention by leveraging the proximity-aware attention, which enhances local structure clues in building long-range dependencies with a linear approximation of attention scores. The relief adjacency matrix technique can utilize the historical global graph information for consistent proximity learning. Meanwhile, the reduced decoder allows for fast inference in a non-autoregressive manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on five large-scale datasets, which demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and validates the effectiveness brought by local structure information.