Dynamic Graph Information Bottleneck for Traffic Prediction

Traffic forecasting in large-scale urban networks must operate reliably under imperfect sensing conditions, where measurements may contain noise or missing values. Most existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks focus primarily on modeling spatial–temporal dependencies, while paying limited attention to the propagation of irrelevant or unstable information through dynamic graph structures. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Graph Information Bottleneck (DGIB) framework that enhances prediction stability by introducing task-aware representation compression into dynamic graph learning. Instead of relying solely on architectural complexity, DGIB explicitly regulates the information flow within spatio-temporal embeddings through a variational bottleneck objective. The model adaptively constructs time-evolving adjacency matrices, extracts spatial features via graph convolutions, captures temporal dependencies using recurrent modeling, and constrains the latent representation to retain only predictive content relevant to future traffic states. By jointly optimizing topology adaptation and information-theoretic regularization in an end-to-end manner, the proposed framework mitigates the amplification of noisy or redundant signals in dynamic graphs. Experiments on multiple benchmark traffic datasets demonstrate that DGIB achieves competitive forecasting accuracy while maintaining strong robustness under noisy and incomplete data scenarios.