Joint Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction through Posterior Sampling

Haotian Lin, Yixiao Wang, Mingxiao Huo, Chensheng Peng, Zhiyuan Liu, Masayoshi Tomizuka

Abstract: Joint pedestrian trajectory prediction has long grappled with the inherent unpredictability of human behaviors. Recent works employing conditional diffusion models in trajectory prediction have exhibited notable success. Nevertheless, the heavy dependence on accurate historical data results in their vulnerability to noise disturbances and data incompleteness. To improve the robustness and reliability, we introduce the Guided Full Trajectory Diffuser (GFTD), a novel diffusion-based framework that translates prediction as the inverse problem of spatial-temporal inpainting and models the full joint trajectory distribution which includes both history and the future. By learning from the full trajectory and leveraging flexible posterior sampling methods, GFTD can produce accurate predictions while improving the robustness that can generalize to scenarios with noise perturbation or incomplete historical data. Moreover, the pre-trained model enables controllable generation without an additional training budget. Through rigorous experimental evaluation, GFTD exhibits superior performance in joint trajectory prediction with different data quality and in controllable generation tasks. See more results at https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/posterior-sampling-prediction.