ChaosNetBench: Benchmarking Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks on Chaotic Lattice Dynamics

Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) are widely used for short-term forecasting in dynamic physical systems such as traffic and weather. However, the prevailing evaluation practice uses real world benchmark data sets in a single domain with a single fixed holdout splits, making it difficult to compare architectures across different dynamical regimes. We introduce ChaosNetBench (CNB), a synthetic benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for studying STGNN performance under controlled multidimensional chaotic dynamics. CNB is built on a lattice of coupled standard maps with independently tunable local chaos ($K$), coupling strength ($\varepsilon$), and system size ($N$), providing known topology and known dynamics across 96 system instances and 9{,}600 trajectories. We introduce chaos indicators, evaluation metrics and a protocol to analyze and compare the capacity of STGNN architectures to deal with different levels of local and global chaos. We illustrate the usage of the framework by analyzing 13 architectures (5 STGNNs and 8 non-graph baselines). The results reveal a regime dependent transition in which non-graph baselines (TCN, N-BEATS, iTransformer) remain competitive when there is low local chaos, while STGNNs (e.g., Graph WaveNet, D2STGNN, STAEformer) are generally more resilient to higher levels of local and global chaos. CNB provides a practical, reusable testbed for systematically comparing and analyzing the capacity of STGNN architectures to handle different levels of local and global chaos.

A lightweight Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Long-term Time Series Forecasting

We propose Lite-STGNN, a lightweight spatial-temporal graph neural network for long-term multivariate forecasting that integrates decomposition-based temporal modeling with learnable sparse graph structure. The temporal module applies trend-seasonal decomposition, while the spatial module performs message passing with low-rank Top-$K$ adjacency learning and conservative horizon-wise gating, enabling spatial corrections that enhance a strong linear baseline. Lite-STGNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on four benchmark datasets for horizons up to 720 steps, while being parameter-efficient and substantially faster to train than transformer-based methods. Ablation studies show that the spatial module yields 4.6% improvement over the temporal baseline, Top-$K$ enhances locality by 3.3%, and learned adjacency matrices reveal domain-specific interaction dynamics. Lite-STGNN thus offers a compact, interpretable, and efficient framework for long-term multivariate time series forecasting.