ChronoSheaf: Joint Spatio-Temporal Spectral Filtering on Cellular Sheaves

Abstract

Sheaf neural networks generalize graph neural networks by assigning each edge a learned linear restriction map that specifies how the local representations of adjacent nodes relate to one another, thereby mitigating oversmoothing. Existing sheaf architectures, however, define the sheaf Laplacian as an instantaneous spatial operator and therefore cannot explicitly model how signals evolve over time on a graph. We first introduce a spectral sheaf Laplacian, defined jointly over space and time, such that a single operator regulates signal propagation across both the spatial graph and the temporal domain. Directly extending this operator's receptive field in space or time would require increasingly complex sheaf structures. Instead, we propose a spectral filter that expands the effective receptive field along both dimensions without enlarging the underlying sheaf. Building on this operator, we introduce ChronoSheaf, a spatio-temporal sheaf network with two key components. First, Transitional Restriction Maps (TRM) decompose each node's restriction map into a spatial term and two temporal frames that independently control its relation to neighboring nodes at the preceding and following timestep, enabling asymmetric temporal influence. Second, the Dual Spectral Filter (DSF) applies a single bounded-degree polynomial filter with an adaptively estimated spectral radius to the joint spatio-temporal sheaf operator. We validate ChronoSheaf on a diverse set of spatio-temporal forecasting benchmarks, where it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ChronoSheaf-1D7D/.