# Congestion-aware Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction for Collision Avoidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Predictions for Autonomous Driving using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10732/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Social Pooling for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06771/) (2018)
- [Deep Unsupervised Clustering with Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02648/) (2016)
- [Variational Deep Embedding: An Unsupervised and Generative Approach to Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05148/) (2016)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Rules of the Road: Predicting Driving Behavior with a Convolutional Model of Semantic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08945/) (2019)
- [An LSTM Network for Highway Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07962/) (2018)
- [Multi-Modal Trajectory Prediction of Surrounding Vehicles with Maneuver based LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05499/) (2018)
- [Recursive Social Behavior Graph for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10402/) (2020)
- [Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09044/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Vehicle Trajectory Prediction over Occupancy Grid Map via Recurrent Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07049/) (2017)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Prediction of Vehicle Trajectory via LSTM Encoder-Decoder Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06338/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Probabilistic Model-Based Planning for Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09483/) (2017)
- [Multi-Agent Imitation Learning for Driving Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01044/) (2018)
- [How would surround vehicles move? A Unified Framework for Maneuver Classification and Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06523/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Behavioral Intention Prediction in Driving Scenes: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00385/) (2022)
- [BAT: Behavior-Aware Human-Like Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06371/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Context-Aware Multi-Agent Systems: Techniques, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01968/) (2024)
- [Machine Learning for Autonomous Vehicle's Trajectory Prediction: A comprehensive survey, Challenges, and Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07527/) (2023)
- [A Cognitive-Based Trajectory Prediction Approach for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19251/) (2024)
- [DeepTrack: Lightweight Deep Learning for Vehicle Path Prediction in Highways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00505/) (2021)
- [MFTraj: Map-Free, Behavior-Driven Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01266/) (2024)
- [NEST: A Neuromodulated Small-world Hypergraph Trajectory Prediction Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11682/) (2024)
- [Heterogeneous Trajectory Forecasting via Risk and Scene Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00848/) (2022)
- [Minds on the Move: Decoding Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving with Cognitive Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20084/) (2025)
- [Pishgu: Universal Path Prediction Network Architecture for Real-time Cyber-physical Edge Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08057/) (2022)
- [Inferring Player Location in Sports Matches: Multi-Agent Spatial Imputation from Limited Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06569/) (2023)
- [C2F-TP: A Coarse-to-Fine Denoising Framework for Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13231/) (2024)
- [Neuroevolutionary Multi-objective approaches to Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02105/) (2022)
- [Beyond Patterns: Harnessing Causal Logic for Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06856/) (2025)
- [SafeCast: Risk-Responsive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22541/) (2025)
- [Addressing Corner Cases in Autonomous Driving: A World Model-based Approach with Mixture of Experts and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21867/) (2025)
- [Characterized Diffusion Networks for Enhanced Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16457/) (2024)
- [Towards Human-Like Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: A Behavior-Centric Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21565/) (2025)
- [Chatting about Conditional Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18126/) (2026)
- [SWIFT: A Small-World Interaction Framework for Flow-Aware Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09741/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting agents' future trajectories plays a crucial role in modern AI systems, yet it is challenging due to intricate interactions exhibited in multi-agent systems, especially when it comes to collision avoidance. To address this challenge, we propose to learn congestion patterns as contextual cues explicitly and devise a novel "Sense--Learn--Reason--Predict" framework by exploiting advantages of three different doctrines of thought, which yields the following desirable benefits: (i) Representing congestion as contextual cues via latent factors subsumes the concept of social force commonly used in physics-based approaches and implicitly encodes the distance as a cost, similar to the way a planning-based method models the environment. (ii) By decomposing the learning phases into two stages, a "student" can learn contextual cues from a "teacher" while generating collision-free trajectories. To make the framework computationally tractable, we formulate it as an optimization problem and derive an upper bound by leveraging the variational parametrization. In experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate collision-free trajectory predictions in a synthetic dataset designed for collision avoidance evaluation and remains competitive on the commonly used NGSIM US-101 highway dataset.