In this paper, we present a real-time egocentric trajectory prediction system for table tennis using event cameras. Unlike standard cameras, which suffer from high latency and motion blur at fast ball speeds, event cameras provide higher temporal resolution, allowing more frequent state updates, greater robustness to outliers, and accurate trajectory predictions using just a short time window after the opponent's impact. We collect a dataset of ping-pong game sequences, including 3D ground-truth trajectories of the ball, synchronized with sensor data from the Meta Project Aria glasses and event streams. Our system leverages foveated vision, using eye-gaze data from the glasses to process only events in the viewer's fovea. This biologically inspired approach improves ball detection performance and significantly reduces computational latency, as it efficiently allocates resources to the most perceptually relevant regions, achieving a reduction factor of 10.81 on the collected trajectories. Our detection pipeline has a worst-case total latency of 4.5 ms, including computation and perception - significantly lower than a frame-based 30 FPS system, which, in the worst case, takes 66 ms solely for perception. Finally, we fit a trajectory prediction model to the estimated states of the ball, enabling 3D trajectory forecasting in the future. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to predict table tennis trajectories from an egocentric perspective using event cameras.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in integrating language-driven techniques into trajectory prediction. By leveraging their semantic and reasoning capabilities, LLMs are reshaping how autonomous systems perceive, model, and predict trajectories. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging field, categorizing recent work into five directions: (1) Trajectory prediction via language modeling paradigms, (2) Direct trajectory prediction with pretrained language models, (3) Language-guided scene understanding for trajectory prediction, (4) Language-driven data generation for trajectory prediction, (5) Language-based reasoning and interpretability for trajectory prediction. For each, we analyze representative methods, highlight core design choices, and identify open challenges. This survey bridges natural language processing and trajectory prediction, offering a unified perspective on how language can enrich trajectory prediction.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving show promise but falter in unstructured corner case scenarios, largely due to a scarcity of targeted benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Impromptu VLA. Our core contribution is the Impromptu VLA Dataset: over 80,000 meticulously curated video clips, distilled from over 2M source clips sourced from 8 open-source large-scale datasets. This dataset is built upon our novel taxonomy of four challenging unstructured categories and features rich, planning-oriented question-answering annotations and action trajectories. Crucially, experiments demonstrate that VLAs trained with our dataset achieve substantial performance gains on established benchmarks--improving closed-loop NeuroNCAP scores and collision rates, and reaching near state-of-the-art L2 accuracy in open-loop nuScenes trajectory prediction. Furthermore, our Q&A suite serves as an effective diagnostic, revealing clear VLM improvements in perception, prediction, and planning. Our code, data and models are available at https://github.com/ahydchh/Impromptu-VLA.
With the increasing demands for safety, efficiency, and sustainability in global shipping, Automatic Identification System (AIS) data plays an increasingly important role in maritime monitoring. AIS data contains spatial-temporal variation patterns of vessels that hold significant research value in the marine domain. However, due to its massive scale, the full potential of AIS data has long remained untapped. With its powerful sequence modeling capabilities, particularly its ability to capture long-range dependencies and complex temporal dynamics, the Transformer model has emerged as an effective tool for processing AIS data. Therefore, this paper reviews the research on Transformer-based AIS data-driven maritime monitoring, providing a comprehensive overview of the current applications of Transformer models in the marine field. The focus is on Transformer-based trajectory prediction methods, behavior detection, and prediction techniques. Additionally, this paper collects and organizes publicly available AIS datasets from the reviewed papers, performing data filtering, cleaning, and statistical analysis. The statistical results reveal the operational characteristics of different vessel types, providing data support for further research on maritime monitoring tasks. Finally, we offer valuable suggestions for future research, identifying two promising research directions. Datasets are available at https://github.com/eyesofworld/Maritime-Monitoring.
Trajectory prediction is a key element of autonomous vehicle systems, enabling them to anticipate and react to the movements of other road users. Evaluating the robustness of prediction models against adversarial attacks is essential to ensure their reliability in real-world traffic. However, current approaches tend to focus on perturbing the past positions of surrounding agents, which can generate unrealistic scenarios and overlook critical vulnerabilities. This limitation may result in overly optimistic assessments of model performance in real-world conditions. In this work, we demonstrate that perturbing not just past but also future states of adversarial agents can uncover previously undetected weaknesses and thereby provide a more rigorous evaluation of model robustness. Our novel approach incorporates dynamic constraints and preserves tactical behaviors, enabling more effective and realistic adversarial attacks. We introduce new performance measures to assess the realism and impact of these adversarial trajectories. Testing our method on a state-of-the-art prediction model revealed significant increases in prediction errors and collision rates under adversarial conditions. Qualitative analysis further showed that our attacks can expose critical weaknesses, such as the inability of the model to detect potential collisions in what appear to be safe predictions. These results underscore the need for more comprehensive adversarial testing to better evaluate and improve the reliability of trajectory prediction models for autonomous vehicles.
Trajectory prediction is a crucial task in modeling human behavior, especially in fields as social robotics and autonomous vehicle navigation. Traditional heuristics based on handcrafted rules often lack accuracy, while recently proposed deep learning approaches suffer from computational cost, lack of explainability, and generalization issues that limit their practical adoption. In this paper, we introduce TrajEvo, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically design trajectory prediction heuristics. TrajEvo employs an evolutionary algorithm to generate and refine prediction heuristics from past trajectory data. We introduce a Cross-Generation Elite Sampling to promote population diversity and a Statistics Feedback Loop allowing the LLM to analyze alternative predictions. Our evaluations show TrajEvo outperforms previous heuristic methods on the ETH-UCY datasets, and remarkably outperforms both heuristics and deep learning methods when generalizing to the unseen SDD dataset. TrajEvo represents a first step toward automated design of fast, explainable, and generalizable trajectory prediction heuristics. We make our source code publicly available to foster future research at https://github.com/ai4co/trajevo.
Analyzing a player's technique in table tennis requires knowledge of the ball's 3D trajectory and spin. While, the spin is not directly observable in standard broadcasting videos, we show that it can be inferred from the ball's trajectory in the video. We present a novel method to infer the initial spin and 3D trajectory from the corresponding 2D trajectory in a video. Without ground truth labels for broadcast videos, we train a neural network solely on synthetic data. Due to the choice of our input data representation, physically correct synthetic training data, and using targeted augmentations, the network naturally generalizes to real data. Notably, these simple techniques are sufficient to achieve generalization. No real data at all is required for training. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a method for spin and trajectory prediction in simple monocular broadcast videos, achieving an accuracy of 92.0% in spin classification and a 2D reprojection error of 0.19% of the image diagonal.
Service mobile robots are often required to avoid dynamic objects while performing their tasks, but they usually have only limited computational resources. So we present a lightweight multi-modal framework for 3D object detection and trajectory prediction. Our system synergistically integrates LiDAR and camera inputs to achieve real-time perception of pedestrians, vehicles, and riders in 3D space. The framework proposes two novel modules: 1) a Cross-Modal Deformable Transformer (CMDT) for object detection with high accuracy and acceptable amount of computation, and 2) a Reference Trajectory-based Multi-Class Transformer (RTMCT) for efficient and diverse trajectory prediction of mult-class objects with flexible trajectory lengths. Evaluations on the CODa benchmark demonstrate superior performance over existing methods across detection (+2.03% in mAP) and trajectory prediction (-0.408m in minADE5 of pedestrians) metrics. Remarkably, the system exhibits exceptional deployability - when implemented on a wheelchair robot with an entry-level NVIDIA 3060 GPU, it achieves real-time inference at 13.2 fps. To facilitate reproducibility and practical deployment, we release the related code of the method at https://github.com/TossherO/3D_Perception and its ROS inference version at https://github.com/TossherO/ros_packages.
Deep learning-based trajectory prediction models have demonstrated promising capabilities in capturing complex interactions. However, their out-of-distribution generalization remains a significant challenge, particularly due to unbalanced data and a lack of enough data and diversity to ensure robustness and calibration. To address this, we propose SHIFT (Spectral Heteroscedastic Informed Forecasting for Trajectories), a novel framework that uniquely combines well-calibrated uncertainty modeling with informative priors derived through automated rule extraction. SHIFT reformulates trajectory prediction as a classification task and employs heteroscedastic spectral-normalized Gaussian processes to effectively disentangle epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. We learn informative priors from training labels, which are automatically generated from natural language driving rules, such as stop rules and drivability constraints, using a retrieval-augmented generation framework powered by a large language model. Extensive evaluations over the nuScenes dataset, including challenging low-data and cross-location scenarios, demonstrate that SHIFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving substantial gains in uncertainty calibration and displacement metrics. In particular, our model excels in complex scenarios, such as intersections, where uncertainty is inherently higher. Project page: https://kumarmanas.github.io/SHIFT/.
Predicting hand motion is critical for understanding human intentions and bridging the action space between human movements and robot manipulations. Existing hand trajectory prediction (HTP) methods forecast the future hand waypoints in 3D space conditioned on past egocentric observations. However, such models are only designed to accommodate 2D egocentric video inputs. There is a lack of awareness of multimodal environmental information from both 2D and 3D observations, hindering the further improvement of 3D HTP performance. In addition, these models overlook the synergy between hand movements and headset camera egomotion, either predicting hand trajectories in isolation or encoding egomotion only from past frames. To address these limitations, we propose novel diffusion models (MMTwin) for multimodal 3D hand trajectory prediction. MMTwin is designed to absorb multimodal information as input encompassing 2D RGB images, 3D point clouds, past hand waypoints, and text prompt. Besides, two latent diffusion models, the egomotion diffusion and the HTP diffusion as twins, are integrated into MMTwin to predict camera egomotion and future hand trajectories concurrently. We propose a novel hybrid Mamba-Transformer module as the denoising model of the HTP diffusion to better fuse multimodal features. The experimental results on three publicly available datasets and our self-recorded data demonstrate that our proposed MMTwin can predict plausible future 3D hand trajectories compared to the state-of-the-art baselines, and generalizes well to unseen environments. The code and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/MMTwin.
Humans can predict future human trajectories even from momentary observations by using human pose-related cues. However, previous Human Trajectory Prediction (HTP) methods leverage the pose cues implicitly, resulting in implausible predictions. To address this, we propose Locomotion Embodiment, a framework that explicitly evaluates the physical plausibility of the predicted trajectory by locomotion generation under the laws of physics. While the plausibility of locomotion is learned with an indifferentiable physics simulator, it is replaced by our differentiable Locomotion Value function to train an HTP network in a data-driven manner. In particular, our proposed Embodied Locomotion loss is beneficial for efficiently training a stochastic HTP network using multiple heads. Furthermore, the Locomotion Value filter is proposed to filter out implausible trajectories at inference. Experiments demonstrate that our method enhances even the state-of-the-art HTP methods across diverse datasets and problem settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ImIntheMiddle/EmLoco.
End-to-end autonomous driving research currently faces a critical challenge in bridging the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop deployment. Current approaches are trained to predict trajectories in an open-loop environment, which struggle with quick reactions to other agents in closed-loop environments and risk generating kinematically infeasible plans due to the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce Hydra-NeXt, a novel multi-branch planning framework that unifies trajectory prediction, control prediction, and a trajectory refinement network in one model. Unlike current open-loop trajectory prediction models that only handle general-case planning, Hydra-NeXt further utilizes a control decoder to focus on short-term actions, which enables faster responses to dynamic situations and reactive agents. Moreover, we propose the Trajectory Refinement module to augment and refine the planning decisions by effectively adhering to kinematic constraints in closed-loop environments. This unified approach bridges the gap between open-loop training and closed-loop driving, demonstrating superior performance of 65.89 Driving Score (DS) and 48.20% Success Rate (SR) on the Bench2Drive dataset without relying on external experts for data collection. Hydra-NeXt surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 22.98 DS and 17.49 SR, marking a significant advancement in autonomous driving. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/Hydra-NeXt.
Although end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) technologies have made significant progress in recent years, there remains an unsatisfactory performance on closed-loop evaluation. The potential of leveraging planning in query design and interaction has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we introduce a multi-granularity planning query representation that integrates heterogeneous waypoints, including spatial, temporal, and driving-style waypoints across various sampling patterns. It provides additional supervision for trajectory prediction, enhancing precise closed-loop control for the ego vehicle. Additionally, we explicitly utilize the geometric properties of planning trajectories to effectively retrieve relevant image features based on physical locations using deformable attention. By combining these strategies, we propose a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework, termed HiP-AD, which simultaneously performs perception, prediction, and planning within a unified decoder. HiP-AD enables comprehensive interaction by allowing planning queries to iteratively interact with perception queries in the BEV space while dynamically extracting image features from perspective views. Experiments demonstrate that HiP-AD outperforms all existing end-to-end autonomous driving methods on the closed-loop benchmark Bench2Drive and achieves competitive performance on the real-world dataset nuScenes.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive results in reasoning tasks, their application to pedestrian trajectory prediction remains challenging due to two key limitations: insufficient use of visual information and the difficulty of predicting entire trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for pedestrian trajectory using Chain-of-Thought (GUIDE-CoT). Our approach integrates two innovative modules: (1) a goal-oriented visual prompt, which enhances goal prediction accuracy combining visual prompts with a pretrained visual encoder, and (2) a chain-of-thought (CoT) LLM for trajectory generation, which generates realistic trajectories toward the predicted goal. Moreover, our method introduces controllable trajectory generation, allowing for flexible and user-guided modifications to the predicted paths. Through extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY benchmark datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering both high accuracy and greater adaptability in pedestrian trajectory prediction. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ai-kmu/GUIDE-CoT.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in real-world applications. However, concerns about the reliability of the content they generate persist, as it frequently deviates from factual correctness or exhibits deficiencies in logical reasoning. This paper proposes a novel decoding strategy aimed at enhancing both factual accuracy and inferential reasoning without requiring any modifications to the architecture or pre-trained parameters of LLMs. Our approach adjusts next-token probabilities by analyzing the trajectory of logits from lower to higher layers in Transformers and applying linear regression. We find that this Decoding by Logit Trajectory-based approach (DeLTa) effectively reinforces factuality and reasoning while mitigating incorrect generation. Experiments on TruthfulQA demonstrate that DeLTa attains up to a 4.9% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, it enhances performance by up to 8.1% on StrategyQA and 7.3% on GSM8K, both of which demand strong reasoning capabilities.
Conventional human trajectory prediction models rely on clean curated data, requiring specialized equipment or manual labeling, which is often impractical for robotic applications. The existing predictors tend to overfit to clean observation affecting their robustness when used with noisy inputs. In this work, we propose MonoTransmotion (MT), a Transformer-based framework that uses only a monocular camera to jointly solve localization and prediction tasks. Our framework has two main modules: Bird's Eye View (BEV) localization and trajectory prediction. The BEV localization module estimates the position of a person using 2D human poses, enhanced by a novel directional loss for smoother sequential localizations. The trajectory prediction module predicts future motion from these estimates. We show that by jointly training both tasks with our unified framework, our method is more robust in real-world scenarios made of noisy inputs. We validate our MT network on both curated and non-curated datasets. On the curated dataset, MT achieves around 12% improvement over baseline models on BEV localization and trajectory prediction. On real-world non-curated dataset, experimental results indicate that MT maintains similar performance levels, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. The code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/MonoTransmotion.
Predicting disease trajectories from electronic health records (EHRs) is a complex task due to major challenges such as data non-stationarity, high granularity of medical codes, and integration of multimodal data. EHRs contain both structured data, such as diagnostic codes, and unstructured data, such as clinical notes, which hold essential information often overlooked. Current models, primarily based on structured data, struggle to capture the complete medical context of patients, resulting in a loss of valuable information. To address this issue, we propose an approach that integrates unstructured clinical notes into transformer-based deep learning models for sequential disease prediction. This integration enriches the representation of patients' medical histories, thereby improving the accuracy of diagnosis predictions. Experiments on MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional models relying solely on structured data.
Vehicle-to-everything technologies (V2X) have become an ideal paradigm to extend the perception range and see through the occlusion. Exiting efforts focus on single-frame cooperative perception, however, how to capture the temporal cue between frames with V2X to facilitate the prediction task even the planning task is still underexplored. In this paper, we introduce the Co-MTP, a general cooperative trajectory prediction framework with multi-temporal fusion for autonomous driving, which leverages the V2X system to fully capture the interaction among agents in both history and future domains to benefit the planning. In the history domain, V2X can complement the incomplete history trajectory in single-vehicle perception, and we design a heterogeneous graph transformer to learn the fusion of the history feature from multiple agents and capture the history interaction. Moreover, the goal of prediction is to support future planning. Thus, in the future domain, V2X can provide the prediction results of surrounding objects, and we further extend the graph transformer to capture the future interaction among the ego planning and the other vehicles' intentions and obtain the final future scenario state under a certain planning action. We evaluate the Co-MTP framework on the real-world dataset V2X-Seq, and the results show that Co-MTP achieves state-of-the-art performance and that both history and future fusion can greatly benefit prediction.
Trajectory prediction allows better decision-making in applications of autonomous vehicles or surveillance by predicting the short-term future movement of traffic agents. It is classified into pedestrian or heterogeneous trajectory prediction. The former exploits the relatively consistent behavior of pedestrians, but is limited in real-world scenarios with heterogeneous traffic agents such as cyclists and vehicles. The latter typically relies on extra class label information to distinguish the heterogeneous agents, but such labels are costly to annotate and cannot be generalized to represent different behaviors within the same class of agents. In this work, we introduce the behavioral pseudo-labels that effectively capture the behavior distributions of pedestrians and heterogeneous agents solely based on their motion features, significantly improving the accuracy of trajectory prediction. To implement the framework, we propose the Behavioral Pseudo-Label Informed Sparse Graph Convolution Network (BP-SGCN) that learns pseudo-labels and informs to a trajectory predictor. For optimization, we propose a cascaded training scheme, in which we first learn the pseudo-labels in an unsupervised manner, and then perform end-to-end fine-tuning on the labels in the direction of increasing the trajectory prediction accuracy. Experiments show that our pseudo-labels effectively model different behavior clusters and improve trajectory prediction. Our proposed BP-SGCN outperforms existing methods using both pedestrian (ETH/UCY, pedestrian-only SDD) and heterogeneous agent datasets (SDD, Argoverse 1).
We propose a novel model for the prediction of robot trajectories on rough offroad terrain from the onboard camera images. This model enforces the laws of classical mechanics through a physics-aware neural symbolic layer while preserving the ability to learn from large-scale data as it is end-to-end differentiable. The proposed hybrid model integrates a black-box component that predicts robot-terrain interaction forces with a neural-symbolic layer. This layer includes a differentiable physics engine that computes the robot's trajectory by querying these forces at the points of contact with the terrain. As the proposed architecture comprises substantial geometrical and physics priors, the resulting model can also be seen as a learnable physics engine conditioned on real images that delivers $10^4$ trajectories per second. We argue and empirically demonstrate that this architecture reduces the sim-to-real gap and mitigates out-of-distribution sensitivity. The differentiability, in conjunction with the rapid simulation speed, makes the model well-suited for various applications including model predictive control, trajectory shooting, supervised and reinforcement learning or SLAM. The codes and data are publicly available.