Adapting to Length Shift: FlexiLength Network for Trajectory Prediction

Yi Xu, Yun Fu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 15226-15237

Trajectory prediction plays an important role in various applications including autonomous driving robotics and scene understanding. Existing approaches mainly focus on developing compact neural networks to increase prediction precision on public datasets typically employing a standardized input duration. However a notable issue arises when these models are evaluated with varying observation lengths leading to a significant performance drop a phenomenon we term the Observation Length Shift. To address this issue we introduce a general and effective framework the FlexiLength Network (FLN) to enhance the robustness of existing trajectory prediction techniques against varying observation periods. Specifically FLN integrates trajectory data with diverse observation lengths incorporates FlexiLength Calibration (FLC) to acquire temporal invariant representations and employs FlexiLength Adaptation (FLA) to further refine these representations for more accurate future trajectory predictions. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets i.e. ETH/UCY nuScenes and Argoverse 1 demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed FLN framework.