RAG-TP: A General Framework for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Ziyi Wang, Yang Zhang, Guijian Tang, Chao Zhang, Shibo Zhang, Xueqiong Li, Shaowu Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 24865-24874

Vehicle trajectory prediction is critical for safe and efficient autonomous driving. However, its generalization and scalability are hindered by heavy reliance on real-time, online priors. To break this bottleneck, we introduce RAG-TP, a framework reframing the problem from relying on uncertain online perception to retrieving from a large-scale, structured knowledge base. RAG-TP enhances inference-time predictions by dynamically querying a heterogeneous knowledge base rich with scene topologies and motion patterns, using retrieved historical experiences as priors. We further design a dynamic fusion module based on a novel Retrieval-Driven Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). Unlike conventional parametric designs, this mechanism dynamically treats retrieved knowledge units as experts, weighting and integrating them via cross-attention to generate a dense context for final multi-modal trajectory decoding. By decoupling online inference from offline knowledge, this approach grounds predictions in a vast structured database, mitigating model hallucination, compensating for unreliable priors, and significantly enhancing robustness and domain adaptation. Extensive experiments show RAG-TP achieves excellent performance in map-based and map-free settings, demonstrating highly competitive results against specialized map-free methods while performing on par with state-of-the-art (SOTA) map-based models. It demonstrates significant advantages, particularly in cross-domain and zero-shot generalization. Our work provides a promising technical pathway toward building scalable and robust prediction systems for autonomous driving.