  With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS),
accurate traffic forecasting has emerged as a critical challenge. The key
bottleneck lies in capturing the intricate spatio-temporal traffic patterns. In
recent years, numerous neural networks with complicated architectures have been
proposed to address this issue. However, the advancements in network
architectures have encountered diminishing performance gains. In this study, we
present a novel component called spatio-temporal adaptive embedding that can
yield outstanding results with vanilla transformers. Our proposed
Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding transformer (STAEformer) achieves
state-of-the-art performance on five real-world traffic forecasting datasets.
Further experiments demonstrate that spatio-temporal adaptive embedding plays a
crucial role in traffic forecasting by effectively capturing intrinsic
spatio-temporal relations and chronological information in traffic time series.
