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 spatiotemporal transformer


STNDT: Modeling Neural Population Activity with Spatiotemporal Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modeling neural population dynamics underlying noisy single-trial spiking activities is essential for relating neural observation and behavior. A recent non-recurrent method - Neural Data Transformers (NDT) - has shown great success in capturing neural dynamics with low inference latency without an explicit dynamical model. However, NDT focuses on modeling the temporal evolution of the population activity while neglecting the rich covariation between individual neurons. In this paper we introduce SpatioTemporal Neural Data Transformer (STNDT), an NDT-based architecture that explicitly models responses of individual neurons in the population across time and space to uncover their underlying firing rates. In addition, we propose a contrastive learning loss that works in accordance with mask modeling objective to further improve the predictive performance. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ensemble level in estimating neural activities across four neural datasets, demonstrating its capability to capture autonomous and non-autonomous dynamics spanning different cortical regions while being completely agnostic to the specific behaviors at hand. Furthermore, STNDT spatial attention mechanism reveals consistently important subsets of neurons that play a vital role in driving the response of the entire population, providing interpretability and key insights into how the population of neurons performs computation.


MoCap2Radar: A Spatiotemporal Transformer for Synthesizing Micro-Doppler Radar Signatures from Motion Capture

Chen, Kevin, Parker, Kenneth W., Arora, Anish

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a pure machine learning process for synthesizing radar spectrograms from Motion-Capture (MoCap) data. We formulate MoCap-to-spectrogram translation as a windowed sequence-to-sequence task using a transformer-based model that jointly captures spatial relations among MoCap markers and temporal dynamics across frames. Real-world experiments show that the proposed approach produces visually and quantitatively plausible doppler radar spectrograms and achieves good generalizability. Ablation experiments show that the learned model includes both the ability to convert multi-part motion into doppler signatures and an understanding of the spatial relations between different parts of the human body. The result is an interesting example of using transformers for time-series signal processing. It is especially applicable to edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) radars. It also suggests the ability to augment scarce radar datasets using more abundant MoCap data for training higher-level applications. Finally, it requires far less computation than physics-based methods for generating radar data.


Modulo Video Recovery via Selective Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer

Geng, Tianyu, Ji, Feng, Tay, Wee Peng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conventional image sensors have limited dynamic range, causing saturation in high-dynamic-range (HDR) scenes. Modulo cameras address this by folding incident irradiance into a bounded range, yet require specialized unwrapping algorithms to reconstruct the underlying signal. Unlike HDR recovery, which extends dynamic range from conventional sampling, modulo recovery restores actual values from folded samples. Despite being introduced over a decade ago, progress in modulo image recovery has been slow, especially in the use of modern deep learning techniques. In this work, we demonstrate that standard HDR methods are unsuitable for modulo recovery. Transformers, however, can capture global dependencies and spatial-temporal relationships crucial for resolving folded video frames. Still, adapting existing Transformer architectures for modulo recovery demands novel techniques. To this end, we present Selective Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer (SSViT), the first deep learning framework for modulo video reconstruction. SSViT employs a token selection strategy to improve efficiency and concentrate on the most critical regions. Experiments confirm that SSViT produces high-quality reconstructions from 8-bit folded videos and achieves state-of-the-art performance in modulo video recovery.


Spatiotemporal Transformers for Predicting Avian Disease Risk from Migration Trajectories

Feng, Dingya, Xue, Dingyuan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Avian - borne pathogens pose persistent risks to wildlife and, at times, to public health; the ongoing H5N1 panzootic has caused extensive mortality in wild birds and livestock with continued geographic expansion and zoonotic concern (Mostafa et al., 2025) . Migratory birds link distant ecosystems across seasons and can create spatiotemporal pathways for pathogen dispersal, with phylodynamic and migration evidence supporting long - range movements of HPAI along flyways, including documented trans - Atlantic incur sion events (Banyard et al., 2024) . Operational early - warning and risk assessment commonly rely on outbreak notifications and targeted surveillance (e.g., WOAH's WAHIS Early Warning), often paired with mathematical or statistical models. Classic global modeling integrated bird flyways, phylogenies, and trade to forecast international spread of H5N1 and identify invasion pathways (Kilpatrick et al., 2006) . Recent genomic and phylodynamic analyses further link dispersal patterns to migration timing and characterize post - introduction spread across flyways (Nguyen et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2024) .


STNDT: Modeling Neural Population Activity with Spatiotemporal Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modeling neural population dynamics underlying noisy single-trial spiking activities is essential for relating neural observation and behavior. A recent non-recurrent method - Neural Data Transformers (NDT) - has shown great success in capturing neural dynamics with low inference latency without an explicit dynamical model. However, NDT focuses on modeling the temporal evolution of the population activity while neglecting the rich covariation between individual neurons. In this paper we introduce SpatioTemporal Neural Data Transformer (STNDT), an NDT-based architecture that explicitly models responses of individual neurons in the population across time and space to uncover their underlying firing rates. In addition, we propose a contrastive learning loss that works in accordance with mask modeling objective to further improve the predictive performance. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on ensemble level in estimating neural activities across four neural datasets, demonstrating its capability to capture autonomous and non-autonomous dynamics spanning different cortical regions while being completely agnostic to the specific behaviors at hand.


SCouT: Synthetic Counterfactuals via Spatiotemporal Transformers for Actionable Healthcare

Dedhia, Bhishma, Balasubramanian, Roshini, Jha, Niraj K.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Synthetic Control method has pioneered a class of powerful data-driven techniques to estimate the counterfactual reality of a unit from donor units. At its core, the technique involves a linear model fitted on the pre-intervention period that combines donor outcomes to yield the counterfactual. However, linearly combining spatial information at each time instance using time-agnostic weights fails to capture important inter-unit and intra-unit temporal contexts and complex nonlinear dynamics of real data. We instead propose an approach to use local spatiotemporal information before the onset of the intervention as a promising way to estimate the counterfactual sequence. To this end, we suggest a Transformer model that leverages particular positional embeddings, a modified decoder attention mask, and a novel pre-training task to perform spatiotemporal sequence-to-sequence modeling. Our experiments on synthetic data demonstrate the efficacy of our method in the typical small donor pool setting and its robustness against noise. We also generate actionable healthcare insights at the population and patient levels by simulating a state-wide public health policy to evaluate its effectiveness, an in silico trial for asthma medications to support randomized controlled trials, and a medical intervention for patients with Friedreich's ataxia to improve clinical decision-making and promote personalized therapy.


GTrans: Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Transformer with Graph Embeddings for Nowcasting Extreme Events

Feng, Bo, Fox, Geoffrey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Spatiotemporal time series nowcasting should preserve temporal and spatial dynamics in the sense that generated new sequences from models respect the covariance relationship from history. Conventional feature extractors are built with deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, CNN models have limits to image-like applications where data can be formed with high-dimensional arrays. In contrast, applications in social networks, road traffic, physics, and chemical property prediction where data features can be organized with nodes and edges of graphs. Transformer architecture is an emerging method for predictive models, bringing high accuracy and efficiency due to attention mechanism design. This paper proposes a spatiotemporal model, namely GTrans, that transforms data features into graph embeddings and predicts temporal dynamics with a transformer model. According to our experiments, we demonstrate that GTrans can model spatial and temporal dynamics and nowcasts extreme events for datasets. Furthermore, in all the experiments, GTrans can achieve the highest F1 and F2 scores in binary-class prediction tests than the baseline models.