From Goals, Waypoints & Paths to Long Term Human Trajectory Forecasting

Karttikeya Mangalam, Yang An, Harshayu Girase, Jitendra Malik; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 15233-15242

Human trajectory forecasting is an inherently multimodal problem. Uncertainty in future trajectories stems from two sources: (a) sources that are known to the agent but unknown to the model, such as long term goals and (b) sources that are unknown to both the agent & the model, such as intent of other agents & irreducible randomness in decisions. We propose to factorize this uncertainty into its epistemic & aleatoric sources. We model the epistemic uncertainty through multimodality in long term goals and the aleatoric uncertainty through multimodality in waypoints & paths. To exemplify this dichotomy, we also propose a novel long term trajectory forecasting setting, with prediction horizons upto a minute, upto an order of magnitude longer than prior works. Finally, we present Y-net, a scene compliant trajectory forecasting network that exploits the proposed epistemic & aleatoric structure for diverse trajectory predictions across long prediction horizons. Y-net significantly improves previous state-of-the-art performance on both (a) The short prediction horizon setting on the Stanford Drone (31.7% in FDE) & ETH/UCY datasets (7.4% in FDE) and (b) The proposed long horizon setting on the re-purposed Stanford Drone & Intersection Drone datasets. Code is available at: https://karttikeya.github.io/publication/ynet/