Select, then Balance: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Exogenous-Aware Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Abstract

Spatio-temporal forecasting aims to predict the future state of dynamic systems and plays an important role in multiple fields. However, existing solutions only focus on modeling using a limited number of observed target variables. In real-world scenarios, exogenous variables can be integrated into the model as additional input features and associated with the target signal to promote forecast accuracy. Although promising, this still encounters two challenges: the inconsistent effects of different exogenous variables to the target system, and the imbalance effects between historical variables and future variables. To address these challenges, this paper introduces \model, a novel framework for modeling \underline{exo}genous variables in \underline{s}patio-\underline{t}emporal forecasting, which follows a ``select, then balance'' paradigm. Specifically, we first construct a latent space gated expert module, where fused exogenous information is projected into a latent space to dynamically select and recompose salient signals via specialized sub-experts. Furthermore, we design a siamese network architecture in which recomposed representations of past and future exogenous variables are fed into dual-branch spatio-temporal backbones to capture dynamic patterns. The outputs are integrated through a context-aware weighting mechanism to achieve dynamic balance during the modeling process. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, generality, robustness, and efficiency of our proposed framework.