ExtrapAir: Air Quality Inference at Unmonitored Locations via Weather-Bridged Spatial Attention

Air quality prediction at unmonitored locations is challenging because historical AQI observations are unavailable, while conventional spatiotemporal models largely rely on target histories to learn spatial dependencies. Meanwhile, widely available weather covariates provide useful station-specific evidence for target-absent inference. In this paper, we propose ExtrapAir, a lightweight weather-bridged framework for air quality inference at unmonitored locations. ExtrapAir preserves variable-specific weather patterns through per-variable weather encoding and learns adaptive weather and AQI correlations for spatial transfer. To support robust inference, we introduce Activation Attention with Prior Inductive Biases, which enables non-competitive spatial aggregation, incorporates geographic and semantic priors for station-pair guidance, and avoids full station-to-station attention computation for scalability. Extensive experiments on five real-world air-quality datasets against 32 baselines show that ExtrapAir reduces MAE by up to 15.24% overall and 16.01% on unmonitored stations, while cutting training time by 84.9% and memory usage by 76.23%, achieving a strong accuracy–efficiency trade-off.