REPST: Language Model Empowered Spatio-Temporal Forecasting via Semantic-Oriented Reprogramming

Spatio-temporal forecasting is pivotal in numerous real-world applications, including transportation planning, energy management, and climate monitoring. In this work, we aim to harness the reasoning and generalization abilities of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for more effective spatio-temporal forecasting, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. However, recent studies uncover that PLMs, which are primarily trained on textual data, often falter when tasked with modeling the intricate correlations in numerical time series, thereby limiting their effectiveness in comprehending spatio-temporal data. To bridge the gap, we propose REPST, a semantic-oriented PLM reprogramming framework tailored for spatio-temporal forecasting. Specifically, we first propose a semantic-oriented decomposer that adaptively disentangles spatially correlated time series into interpretable sub-components, which facilitates PLM to understand sophisticated spatiotemporal dynamics via a divide-and-conquer strategy. Moreover, we propose a selective discrete reprogramming scheme, which introduces an expanded spatio-temporal vocabulary space to project spatio-temporal series into discrete representations. This scheme minimizes the information loss during reprogramming and enriches the representations derived by PLMs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed REPST outperforms twelve state-of-the-art baseline methods, particularly in data-scarce scenarios, highlighting the effectiveness and superior generalization capabilities of PLMs for spatio-temporal forecasting. Codes and Appendix can be found at https://github.com/usail-hkust/REPST.