Improving Trajectory Prediction in Dynamic Multi-Agent Environment by Dropping Waypoints

The inherently diverse and uncertain nature of trajectories presents a formidable challenge in accurately modeling them. Motion prediction systems must effectively learn spatial and temporal information from the past to forecast the future trajectories of the agent. Many existing methods learn temporal motion via separate components within stacked models to capture temporal features. This paper introduces a novel framework, called Temporal Waypoint Dropping (TWD), that promotes explicit temporal learning through the waypoint dropping technique. Learning through waypoint dropping can compel the model to improve its understanding of temporal correlations among agents, thus leading to a significant enhancement in trajectory prediction. Trajectory prediction methods often operate under the assumption that observed trajectory waypoint sequences are complete, disregarding real-world scenarios where missing values may occur, which can influence their performance. Moreover, these models frequently exhibit a bias towards particular waypoint sequences when making predictions. Our TWD is capable of effectively addressing these issues. It incorporates stochastic and fixed processes that regularize projected past trajectories by strategically dropping waypoints based on temporal sequences. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TWD in forcing the model to learn complex temporal correlations among agents. Our approach can complement existing trajectory prediction methods to enhance prediction accuracy. We also evaluate our proposed method across three datasets: NBA Sports VU, ETH-UCY, and TrajNet++.