Bridging the past to the future, connecting agents both spatially and temporally, lies at the core of the trajectory prediction task. Despite great efforts, it remains challenging to explicitly learn and predict latencies, i.e., response intervals or temporal delays with which agents respond to various trajectory-changing events and adjust their future paths, whether on their own or interactively. Different agents may exhibit distinct latency preferences for noticing, processing, and reacting to a specific trajectory-changing event. The lack of consideration of such latencies may undermine the temporal continuity of forecasting systems, leading to implausible or unintended trajectories. Inspired by reverberation in acoustics, we propose a new reverberation transform and the corresponding Reverberation (Rev for short) trajectory prediction model, which predicts both individual latency preferences and their stochastic variations accordingly, by using two explicit and learnable reverberation kernels, enabling latency-conditioned and controllable trajectory prediction under both non-interactive and social latencies. Experiments on multiple datasets, whether of pedestrians or vehicles, demonstrate that Rev achieves competitive accuracy while revealing interpretable latency dynamics across agents and scenarios. Qualitative analyses further verify the properties of the reverberation transform, highlighting its potential as a general latency modeling approach.
Learning and representing the subjectivities of agents has become a challenging but crucial problem in the trajectory prediction task. Such subjectivities not only present specific spatial or temporal structures, but also are anisotropic for all interaction participants. Despite great efforts, it remains difficult to explicitly learn and forecast these subjectivities, let alone further modulate models' predictions through a specific ego's subjectivity. Inspired by prefactual thoughts in psychology and relevant theatrical concepts, we interpret such subjectivities in future trajectories as the continuous process from rehearsal to encore. In the rehearsal phase, the proposed ego predictor focuses on how each ego agent learns to derive and direct a set of explicitly biased rehearsal trajectories for all participants in the scene from the short-term observations. Then, these rehearsal trajectories serve as immediate controls to condition final predictions, providing direct yet distinct ego biases for the prediction network to simulate agents' various subjectivities. Experiments across datasets not only demonstrate a consistent improvement in the performance of the proposed \emph{Encore} trajectory prediction model but also provide clear interpretability regarding subjectivities as biased ego rehearsals.
Conghao Wong, Ziqian Zou, Xinge You
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China.
Trajectory prediction has shifted toward structured formulations with explicit social modeling. However, existing methods inadequately distinguish the functional roles of social influence in trajectory planning. Observing that agents typically form motion plans by anticipating others' future behaviors before making local reactive adjustments, we identify social interactions as playing staged roles, namely planning precedes reaction. We propose INTraJ, a unified framework that decomposes social influence into two stages: a planning stage constructs reference trajectories using future social information, and a reaction stage recovers local adjustments from the residual between full-context prediction and the reference. INTraJ supports both multi-target and single-target paradigms. Extensive experiments on four standard benchmarks, including Argoverse 2, Argoverse 2-ped, ETH/UCY, and SDD, demonstrate consistent improvements, particularly in FDE and long-horizon consistency, with state-of-the-art performance achieved in several settings. INTraJ reframes trajectory prediction as a planning-driven two-stage process, validating that staged social modeling is critical for stable predictions. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/11isnotavailable/INTraJ.
Jiaheng Chen, Jiaxing Li, Tinghe Zhang +1
Software College, Northeastern University Shenyang, China
Trajectory prediction methods have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing complex motion patterns. However, existing methods rely on global state assumptions, suffer from insufficient belief inference under partial observability, and lack cognitive behavioral constraints in prediction. These limitations severely compromise both deployment feasibility and physical plausibility in real-world settings. In this work, we propose FEP-Diff, an agent-centric trajectory prediction framework grounded in the Free Energy Principle, aimed at achieving cognitively plausible predictions under realistic constraints. Specifically, a dual-branch spatiotemporal encoder extracts ego-motion dynamics and social interaction cues from local observations. Building upon this, a goal-conditioned belief learner infers multimodal latent belief distributions optimized via a free-energy objective, with a social consistency constraint on the local neighborhood graph to promote cognitive alignment among neighboring agents. Finally, a residual diffusion trajectory generator is conditioned on the learned belief representations with token-level proxy conditioning, producing precise and diverse future predictions. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that FEP-Diff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under restricted observability. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FEP-Diff-8876.
Yanping Wu, Ji Zhang, Hao Chen +2
University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK · Southwest Jiaotong University Chengdu, China