TSCA-Net: Temporal-Spatial Clique Attention for Interpretable Multimodal Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Md Mustafizur Rahman, Guangchao Yang, A F M Abdun Noor, Md Imam Ahasan, Md Mahfuzur Rahman, Md Ariful Islam
Abstract
Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction in crowded environments remains challenging due to the multimodal uncertainty of human motion and the variable complexity of motion dynamics across different scene contexts. Existing goal-conditioned models rely on static displacement structures that assign equal weight to all historical time steps, standard graph attention mechanisms, and fixed-capacity motion decoders that cannot adapt to local prediction complexity. To address these limitations, we propose TSCA-Net, a trajectory prediction framework built upon three complementary modules. The Temporal-Spatial Clique Attention (TSCA) module introduces learnable temporal gating into clique-based goal-history interaction, enabling time-aware modulation of historical observations relative to each candidate goal. The Cross-Pedestrian Clique Potential (CPCP) module models asymmetric pairwise agent relationships through a dynamic clique potential framework with a time-varying social graph. The Adaptive KAN Grid Refinement (AKGR) mechanism dynamically adjusts the B-spline grid resolution of a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-augmented LSTM decoder based on per-agent goal distribution entropy, balancing model expressiveness against overfitting across varying motion complexities. Extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY and Stanford Drone Dataset benchmarks demonstrate that TSCA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, with average ADE/FDE of 0.13/0.20 m on ETH/UCY and 6.95/10.43 pixels on SDD. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of all three proposed modules.
Pedestrian trajectory prediction requires modeling temporal dynamics, multimodal cues, and social interactions in crowded environments. Existing methods often address these factors separately or entangle them in costly attention blocks, limiting scalability, flexibility, and interpretability. We propose a three-step hierarchical Transformer that explicitly separates temporal encoding, multimodal fusion, and scene-level interaction reasoning. Lightweight GRU summaries enable efficient cross-modal attention, while social attention over time--agent tokens captures inter-pedestrian influences at manageable cost. Experiments on JTA, JRDB, and the Pedestrians and Cyclists in Road Traffic dataset show state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets (JRDB, Urban) and competitive results on JTA. Ablation and qualitative analyses confirm the contribution of each stage and the model's ability to anticipate complex behaviors such as early turning.
Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous systems operating in complex environments, such as modular buses and delivery robots in suburban or semi-structured areas. Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (Social-STGCNN) have shown strong performance by modeling social interactions; however, producing diverse and well-calibrated future trajectories remains challenging. In this work, we build on a Social-STGCNN backbone and introduce a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE)-based probabilistic formulation to explicitly model multimodal future trajectories. We evaluate the method on the ETH and UCY pedestrian trajectory datasets as well as on a real-world pedestrian dataset collected by a mobile robot. Results show moderate gains on public benchmarks, but more consistent endpoint accuracy and improved trajectory diversity across different crowd configurations. Evaluation on robot-collected data further demonstrates the approach's effectiveness beyond curated benchmarks and supports its applicability in practical deployments.
Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction is essential for safe navigation in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. Despite substantial progress made by recent methods, most existing approaches are limited in fully exploiting diverse observations and often overlook the scale dependency of future motion, treating multiscale features uniformly regardless of underlying motion dynamics. This limits their robustness across diverse pedestrian behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose a Predicted-MUltiSCale-Aware Network (MUSCLE-NET) for Pedestrian Trajectory Forecasting that integrates complementary multimodal cues with scale-adaptive prediction mechanisms. The proposed framework is built upon a Multiscale Multimodal Feature Extraction (MMFE) module, which combines multiscale representation, modality-aware recalibration, and directional cross-modal fusion to construct semantically aligned representations from bounding boxes, velocities, and pose information. Building on these features, a Multiscale Enhanced Hierarchical Prediction (MEHP) module performs prediction-aware future-motion refinement via a probabilistic coarse predictor, scale-aligned fusion, and progressive refinement, adaptively selecting scale-relevant cues to mitigate spatial drift. Extensive experiments on the JAAD and PIE benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MUSCLE-Net achieves competitive performance and consistent gains compared with state-of-the-art trajectory prediction methods.