# SCAN: A Spatial Context Attentive Network for Joint Multi-Agent Intent Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [Social-BiGAT: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting using Bicycle-GAN and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03395/) (2019)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [Learning Human-Object Interactions by Graph Parsing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07962/) (2018)
- [An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Attention Model for Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06067/) (2016)
- [Social Ways: Learning Multi-Modal Distributions of Pedestrian Trajectories with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09507/) (2019)
- [Modeling Spatial-Temporal Clues in a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.01561/) (2015)
- [A spatiotemporal model with visual attention for video classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02069/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [LG-Traj: LLM Guided Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08032/) (2024)
- [SSAGCN: Social Soft Attention Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02459/) (2021)
- [Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: Progress, Limitations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03262/) (2025)
- [Attention-aware Social Graph Transformer Networks for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15881/) (2023)
- [Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Missing Data: Datasets, Imputation, and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00174/) (2024)
- [CCF: Cross Correcting Framework for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00749/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Multi-Agent Human Trajectory Prediction: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14831/) (2025)
- [Improving Trajectory Prediction in Dynamic Multi-Agent Environment by Dropping Waypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17338/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Trajectory Prediction through Self-Supervised Waypoint Noise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09466/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Safe navigation of autonomous agents in human centric environments requires the ability to understand and predict motion of neighboring pedestrians. However, predicting pedestrian intent is a complex problem. Pedestrian motion is governed by complex social navigation norms, is dependent on neighbors' trajectories, and is multimodal in nature. In this work, we propose SCAN, a Spatial Context Attentive Network that can jointly predict socially-acceptable multiple future trajectories for all pedestrians in a scene. SCAN encodes the influence of spatially close neighbors using a novel spatial attention mechanism in a manner that relies on fewer assumptions, is parameter efficient, and is more interpretable compared to state-of-the-art spatial attention approaches. Through experiments on several datasets we demonstrate that our approach can also quantitatively outperform state of the art trajectory prediction methods in terms of accuracy of predicted intent.