HiVT: Hierarchical Vector Transformer for Multi-Agent Motion Prediction

Abstract

Accurately predicting the future motions of surrounding traffic agents is critical for the safety of autonomous ve-hicles. Recently, vectorized approaches have dominated the motion prediction community due to their capability of capturing complex interactions in traffic scenes. How-ever, existing methods neglect the symmetries of the prob-lem and suffer from the expensive computational cost, facing the challenge of making real-time multi-agent motion prediction without sacrificing the prediction performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose Hierarchical Vector Transformer (HiVT) for fast and accurate multi-agent motion prediction. By decomposing the problem into local con-text extraction and global interaction modeling, our method can effectively and efficiently model a large number of agents in the scene. Meanwhile, we propose a translation-invariant scene representation and rotation-invariant spa-tial learning modules, which extract features robust to the geometric transformations of the scene and enable the model to make accurate predictions for multiple agents in a single forward pass. Experiments show that HiVT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse motion forecasting benchmark with a small model size and can make fast multi-agent motion prediction.