# Stepwise Goal-Driven Networks for Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14107/

## Key facts

- Cited by 62 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [TNT: Target-driveN Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08294/) (2020)
- [DESIRE: Distant Future Prediction in Dynamic Scenes with Interacting Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04394/) (2017)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [CoverNet: Multimodal Behavior Prediction using Trajectory Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10298/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02025/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06113/) (2019)
- [Social-BiGAT: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting using Bicycle-GAN and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03395/) (2019)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08514/) (2020)
- [PRECOG: PREdiction Conditioned On Goals in Visual Multi-Agent Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01296/) (2019)
- [Multiple Futures Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00997/) (2019)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)
- [SMARTS: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Training School for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09776/) (2020)
- [Peeking into the Future: Predicting Future Person Activities and Locations in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03748/) (2019)
- [SR-LSTM: State Refinement for LSTM towards Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02793/) (2019)
- [Temporal Recurrent Networks for Online Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07391/) (2018)
- [Multi-Modal Trajectory Prediction of Surrounding Vehicles with Maneuver based LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05499/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Neural System for Probabilistic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01631/) (2019)
- [Trajectory Forecasts in Unknown Environments Conditioned on Grid-Based Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00735/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Traffic Accident Detection in First-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00618/) (2019)
- [Long-Term On-Board Prediction of People in Traffic Scenes under Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09026/) (2017)
- [Future Person Localization in First-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11217/) (2017)
- [Trajectron++: Dynamically-Feasible Trajectory Forecasting With Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03093/) (2020)
- [BiTraP: Bi-directional Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Multi-modal Goal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14558/) (2020)
- [Egocentric Vision-based Future Vehicle Localization for Intelligent Driving Assistance Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07408/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01827/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Conditioned on Lane-Graph Traversals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15004/) (2021)
- [THOMAS: Trajectory Heatmap Output with learned Multi-Agent Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06607/) (2021)
- [SocialVAE: Human Trajectory Prediction using Timewise Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08207/) (2022)
- [MUSE-VAE: Multi-Scale VAE for Environment-Aware Long Term Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07189/) (2022)
- [LAformer: Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Lane-Aware Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13933/) (2023)
- [EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09306/) (2023)
- [SingularTrajectory: Universal Trajectory Predictor Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18452/) (2024)
- [Can Language Beat Numerical Regression? Language-Based Multimodal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18447/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Computer Vision in Sports: Open Issues, Future Trends and Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02281/) (2022)
- [PSI: A Benchmark for Human Interpretation and Response in Traffic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02604/) (2021)
- [Action-based Contrastive Learning for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08664/) (2022)
- [Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: Progress, Limitations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03262/) (2025)
- [A Safer Vision-based Autonomous Planning System for Quadrotor UAVs with Dynamic Obstacle Trajectory Prediction and Its Application with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12893/) (2023)
- [Context-Aware Timewise VAEs for Real-Time Vehicle Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10873/) (2023)
- [A Novel Benchmarking Paradigm and a Scale- and Motion-Aware Model for Egocentric Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10424/) (2023)
- [Heterogeneous Trajectory Forecasting via Risk and Scene Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00848/) (2022)
- [Intention-aware Denoising Diffusion Model for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09190/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14744/) (2024)
- [Joint Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction through Posterior Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00237/) (2024)
- [Aware of the History: Trajectory Forecasting with the Local Behavior Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09646/) (2022)
- [Vision-based Multi-future Trajectory Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10463/) (2023)
- [Continuous Locomotive Crowd Behavior Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04756/) (2025)
- [SocialMOIF: Multi-Order Intention Fusion for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15616/) (2025)
- [EgoTraj-Bench: Towards Robust Trajectory Prediction Under Ego-view Noisy Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00405/) (2025)
- [On-Board Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Using Behavioral Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11999/) (2022)
- [DESTINE: Dynamic Goal Queries with Temporal Transductive Alignment for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07438/) (2023)
- [SocialFormer: Social Interaction Modeling with Edge-enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Transformers for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03809/) (2024)
- [Context-aware Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Multimodal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03786/) (2023)
- [Understanding complex crowd dynamics with generative neural simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01491/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose to predict the future trajectories of observed agents (e.g., pedestrians or vehicles) by estimating and using their goals at multiple time scales. We argue that the goal of a moving agent may change over time, and modeling goals continuously provides more accurate and detailed information for future trajectory estimation. To this end, we present a recurrent network for trajectory prediction, called Stepwise Goal-Driven Network (SGNet). Unlike prior work that models only a single, long-term goal, SGNet estimates and uses goals at multiple temporal scales. In particular, it incorporates an encoder that captures historical information, a stepwise goal estimator that predicts successive goals into the future, and a decoder that predicts future trajectory. We evaluate our model on three first-person traffic datasets (HEV-I, JAAD, and PIE) as well as on three bird's eye view datasets (NuScenes, ETH, and UCY), and show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on all datasets. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/ChuhuaW/SGNet.pytorch.