Multibranch Attentive Transformer With Joint Temporal and Social Correlations for Traffic Agents Trajectory Prediction

Accurately predicting the future trajectories of traffic agents is paramount for autonomous unmanned systems, such as self-driving cars and mobile robotics. Extracting abundant temporal and social features from trajectory data and integrating the resulting features effectively pose great challenges for predictive models. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel multibranch attentive transformer (MBAT) trajectory prediction network for traffic agents. Specifically, to explore and reveal diverse correlations of agents, we propose a decoupled temporal and spatial feature learning module with multibranch to extract temporal, spatial, as well as spatiotemporal features. Such design ensures each branch can be specifically tailored for different types of correlations, thus enhancing the flexibility and representation ability of features. Besides, we put forward an attentive transformer architecture that simultaneously models the complex correlations possibly occurring in historical and future timesteps. Moreover, the temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal features can be effectively integrated based on different types of attention mechanisms. Empirical results demonstrate that our model achieves outstanding performance on public ETH, UCY, SDD, and INTERACTION datasets. Detailed ablation studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the model components.