Trajeform: Embedding Crowd Data

Crowd simulation aims to generate agent behaviours that are rich, natural, and appropriate to their surrounding environment. Recent advances in Machine Learning have enabled such behavioural patterns to be learned directly from trajectory data, allowing simulation models to capture increasingly complex crowd dynamics. However, the capabilities of these systems remain strongly dependent on the type and diversity of the data used during training. When evaluating how well crowd simulators generalise to real-world datasets, most existing metrics focus primarily on trajectory-level differences rather than behaviour-level similarity. In this paper, we present Trajeform, a framework that trains a reconstruction VAE (Variational Autoencoder) on real trajectory data to learn a meaningful continuous embedding that preserves behavioural characteristics of real crowds. The trained encoder can then be applied to synthetic trajectories generated by simulators and used to compare the resulting embedding distributions. Additionally, the learned embedding can be used to analyse supplementary data, such as trajectories corresponding to a simulator's principal behaviours or captured data from controlled environments (e.g., cycling), providing insight into their ability to span the real behavioural embedding space. The framework compares data from three simulators (CCP, modCCP, and RVO) against ground-truth datasets and is evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively using latent-space analysis, distributional metrics, and trajectory generation through sampling from the aggregated posterior distribution. The results indicate that the learned latent space captures meaningful trajectory dependencies found in the real data, making the framework useful both as an additional measure of synthetic data believability and as a tool for informing the training of future trajectory models.