Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Overview

The field predicts pedestrians’ future paths to help autonomous vehicles and robots navigate safely around people. Methods range from recurrent networks and Transformers to state-space models, often using social interaction graphs, scene maps, gaze, or intent cues; probabilistic approaches such as CVAEs and flow matching represent multiple possible futures. Evaluation commonly uses displacement errors on ETH/UCY and SDD, with newer work also testing driving datasets, dense crowds, and robot-collected data. A central challenge is balancing accurate forecasts with calibrated uncertainty, social and physical safety, robustness to occlusion and domain shift, and manageable computation.

Latest papers

36 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 26, 2026

TIGFlow-GRPO: Trajectory Forecasting via Interaction-Aware Flow Matching and Reward-Guided Optimization

Human trajectory forecasting is important for intelligent multimedia systems operating in visually complex environments, such as autonomous driving and crowd surveillance. Although Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) has shown strong ability in modeling trajectory distributions from spatio-temporal observations, existing approaches still focus primarily on supervised fitting, which may leave social norms and scene constraints insufficiently reflected in generated trajectories. To address this issue, we propose TIGFlow-GRPO, a two-stage generative approach that aligns flow-based trajectory generation with behavioral rules. In the first stage, we build a CFM-based predictor with a Trajectory-Interaction-Graph (TIG) module to model fine-grained visual-spatial interactions and strengthen context encoding. This stage captures both agent-agent and agent-scene relations more effectively, providing more informative conditional features for subsequent alignment. In the second stage, we perform Flow-GRPO post-training, where deterministic flow rollout is reformulated as stochastic ODE-to-SDE sampling to enable trajectory exploration, and a composite reward combines view-aware social compliance with map-aware physical feasibility. By evaluating trajectories explored through SDE rollout, GRPO progressively steers multimodal predictions toward behaviorally plausible futures. Experiments on the ETH/UCY and SDD datasets show that TIGFlow-GRPOimproves forecasting accuracy and long-horizon stability while generatingtrajectories that are more socially compliant and physically feasible.These results suggest that the proposed approach provides an effective way to connectflow-based trajectory modeling with behavior-aware alignment in dynamic multimedia environments.
Mar 20, 2026

Eye Gaze-Informed and Context-Aware Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Shared Spaces with Automated Shuttles: A Virtual Reality Study

To address this gap, we conduct a Virtual Reality experiment in which pedestrians interact with automated shuttles under varying approach angles (45°, 90°, 135°) and continuous-traffic conditions (single shuttle, two shuttles with 3 or 5-second gaps), collecting synchronized motion, eye gaze, and head orientation data. To investigate to what extent, under what conditions, and in what form fine-grained eye gaze is informative for pedestrian motion prediction, we develop a multi-modal prediction model that fuses these signals through modality-specific encoders, and systematically ablate gaze representations against head orientation and situational context. We report three main results. First, the predictive value of eye gaze is angle-dependent and tightly coupled with eye-head-body coordination: at acute angles where pedestrians actively redirect gaze to acquire the shuttle, eye gaze carries information that head orientation alone misses. Second, continuous gaze orientation outperforms categorical semantic fixation labels, with the optimal encoding frame (global or body-relative) depending on whether gaze is used alone or jointly with context. Third, eye gaze and situational context provide complementary predictive information: their combination reduces final displacement error (FDE) by 8.47%, close to the sum of their individual contributions. Together, these findings highlight the value of incorporating human perceptual signals into pedestrian behavior prediction and motivate a human-centered complement to vehicle-centric modeling approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/danyayay/GazeX.git.
Mar 18, 2026

Efficient Dense Crowd Trajectory Prediction Via Dynamic Clustering

Crowd trajectory prediction plays a crucial role in public safety and management, where it can help prevent disasters such as stampedes. Recent works address the problem by predicting individual trajectories and considering surrounding objects based on manually annotated data. However, these approaches tend to overlook dense crowd scenarios, where the challenges of automation become more pronounced due to the massiveness, noisiness, and inaccuracy of the tracking outputs, resulting in high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose and extensively evaluate a novel cluster-based approach that groups individuals based on similar attributes over time, enabling faster execution through accurate group summarisation. Our plug-and-play method can be combined with existing trajectory predictors by using our output centroid in place of their pedestrian input. We evaluate our proposed method on several challenging dense crowd scenes. We demonstrated that our approach leads to faster processing and lower memory usage when compared with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining the accuracy
Mar 16, 2026

TrajMamba: An Ego-Motion-Guided Mamba Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction from an Egocentric Perspective

Future trajectory prediction of a tracked pedestrian from an egocentric perspective is a key task in areas such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. The challenge of this task lies in the complex dynamic relative motion between the ego-camera and the tracked pedestrian. To address this challenge, we propose an ego-motion-guided trajectory prediction network based on the Mamba model. Firstly, two Mamba models are used as encoders to extract pedestrian motion and ego-motion features from pedestrian movement and ego-vehicle movement, respectively. Then, an ego-motion guided Mamba decoder that explicitly models the relative motion between the pedestrian and the vehicle by integrating pedestrian motion features as historical context with ego-motion features as guiding cues to capture decoded features. Finally, the future trajectory is generated from the decoded features corresponding to the future timestamps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PIE and JAAD datasets.
Mar 11, 2026

Rethinking Gaussian Trajectory Predictors: Calibrated Uncertainty for Safe Planning

Accurate trajectory prediction is critical for safe autonomous navigation in crowded environments. While many trajectory predictors output Gaussian distributions to represent the multi-modal distribution over future pedestrian positions, the reliability of their confidence levels often remains unaddressed. This limitation can lead to unsafe or overly conservative motion planning when the predictor is integrated with an uncertainty-aware planner. Existing Gaussian trajectory predictors primarily rely on the Negative Log-Likelihood loss, which is prone to predict over- or under-confident distributions, and may compromise downstream planner safety. This paper introduces a novel loss function for calibrating prediction uncertainty which leverages Kernel Density Estimation to estimate the empirical distribution of confidence levels. The proposed formulation enforces consistency with the properties of a Gaussian assumption by explicitly matching the estimated empirical distribution to the Chi-squared distribution. To ensure accurate mean prediction, a Mean Squared Error term is also incorporated in the final loss formulation. Experimental results on real-world trajectory datasets show that our method significantly improves the reliability of confidence levels predicted by different State-Of-The-Art Gaussian trajectory predictors. We also demonstrate the importance of providing planners with reliable probabilistic insights (i.e. calibrated confidence levels) for collision-free navigation in complex scenarios. For this purpose, we integrate Gaussian trajectory predictors trained with our loss function with an uncertainty-aware Model Predictive Control on scenarios extracted from real-world datasets, achieving improved planning performance through calibrated confidence levels.
Mar 1, 2026

From GEV to ResLogit: Spatially Correlated Discrete Choice Models for Pedestrian Movement Prediction

High frequency pedestrian motion forecasting when interacting with autonomous vehicles (AVs) can be enhanced through the use of behavioural frameworks, such as discrete choice models, that can explicitly account for correlation among similar movement alternatives. We formulate the pedestrian next step choice as a spatial discrete choice defined by a grid of speed adjustment and heading change. Using naturalistic pedestrian-AV encounters from nuScenes and Argoverse 2 (1 sec decision interval), we estimate a multinomial logit baseline and four spatial generalized extreme value (GEV) specifications (SCL, GSCL, SCNL, and GSCNL). We then compare them to a residual neural network logit (ResLogit) model that learns cross alternative effects while retaining an interpretable linear utility component. Across the evaluated data, spatial GEV structures yield only marginal improvements over multinomial logit, whereas ResLogit achieves a substantially better fit and produces behaviourally coherent errors concentrated among neighbouring grid cells. The results suggest that in dense, high frequency spatial choice sets, learning based residual corrections can capture proximity induced correlation more effectively than analyst specified GEV nesting structures, while maintaining interpretability.