# LatentFormer: Multi-Agent Transformer-Based Interaction Modeling and Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [MultiPath: Multiple Probabilistic Anchor Trajectory Hypotheses for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05449/) (2019)
- [Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13732/) (2020)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (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)
- [It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02025/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Multimodal Motion Prediction with Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11624/) (2021)
- [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)
- [From Goals, Waypoints & Paths To Long Term Human Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01526/) (2020)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)
- [Implicit Latent Variable Model for Scene-Consistent Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12036/) (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)
- [LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06547/) (2021)
- [TPCN: Temporal Point Cloud Networks for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03067/) (2021)
- [TraPHic: Trajectory Prediction in Dense and Heterogeneous Traffic Using Weighted Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04767/) (2018)
- [TPNet: Trajectory Proposal Network for Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12255/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16534/) (2023)
- [Scenario Diffusion: Controllable Driving Scenario Generation With Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02738/) (2023)
- [The Integration of Prediction and Planning in Deep Learning Automated Driving Systems: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05731/) (2023)
- [SMART: Scalable Multi-agent Real-time Motion Generation via Next-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15677/) (2024)
- [DICE: Diverse Diffusion Model with Scoring for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14570/) (2023)
- [Joint Metrics Matter: A Better Standard for Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06292/) (2023)
- [SemanticFormer: Holistic and Semantic Traffic Scene Representation for Trajectory Prediction using Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19379/) (2024)
- [Curb Your Attention: Causal Attention Gating for Robust Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07191/) (2024)
- [TrACT: A Training Dynamics Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Long-tail Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12538/) (2024)
- [DESTINE: Dynamic Goal Queries with Temporal Transductive Alignment for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07438/) (2023)
- [SCOUT+: Towards Practical Task-Driven Drivers' Gaze Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08756/) (2024)
- [AMEND: A Mixture of Experts Framework for Long-tailed Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08698/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multi-Person Motion Prediction by Lightweight Spatial and Temporal Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09446/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15863/) (2025)
- [Scene-Aware Explainable Multimodal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16795/) (2024)
- [Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14633/) (2025)
- [Planning-Aware Diffusion Networks for Enhanced Motion Forecasting in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19639/) (2024)
- [EMT: A Visual Multi-Task Benchmark Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19260/) (2025)
- [Trustworthy Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction via Pattern-Aware Interaction Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13397/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent trajectory prediction is a fundamental problem in autonomous driving. The key challenges in prediction are accurately anticipating the behavior of surrounding agents and understanding the scene context. To address these problems, we propose LatentFormer, a transformer-based model for predicting future vehicle trajectories. The proposed method leverages a novel technique for modeling interactions among dynamic objects in the scene. Contrary to many existing approaches which model cross-agent interactions during the observation time, our method additionally exploits the future states of the agents. This is accomplished using a hierarchical attention mechanism where the evolving states of the agents autoregressively control the contributions of past trajectories and scene encodings in the final prediction. Furthermore, we propose a multi-resolution map encoding scheme that relies on a vision transformer module to effectively capture both local and global scene context to guide the generation of more admissible future trajectories. We evaluate the proposed method on the nuScenes benchmark dataset and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves upon trajectory metrics by up to 40%. We further investigate the contributions of various components of the proposed technique via extensive ablation studies.