# Collaborative Uncertainty Benefits Multi-Agent Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [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)
- [TNT: Target-driveN Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08294/) (2020)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [DESIRE: Distant Future Prediction in Dynamic Scenes with Interacting Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04394/) (2017)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [Social-BiGAT: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting using Bicycle-GAN and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03395/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Motion Prediction with Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11624/) (2021)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13777/) (2022)
- [GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01827/) (2021)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)
- [Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers For Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00563/) (2021)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [HOME: Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10968/) (2021)
- [Rules of the Road: Predicting Driving Behavior with a Convolutional Model of Semantic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08945/) (2019)
- [Peeking into the Future: Predicting Future Person Activities and Locations in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03748/) (2019)
- [LaneRCNN: Distributed Representations for Graph-Centric Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06653/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Conditioned on Lane-Graph Traversals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15004/) (2021)
- [Stochastic Segmentation Networks: Modelling Spatially Correlated Aleatoric Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06015/) (2020)
- [Deep Coordination Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00091/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty Aware Semi-Supervised Learning on Graph Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12783/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Behavioral Intention Prediction in Driving Scenes: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00385/) (2022)
- [Joint-Relation Transformer for Multi-Person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04808/) (2023)
- [Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: Progress, Limitations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03262/) (2025)
- [Breaking Data Silos: Cross-Domain Learning for Multi-Agent Perception from Independent Private Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04273/) (2024)
- [Conformal Trajectory Prediction with Multi-View Data Integration in Cooperative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00374/) (2024)
- [Heteroscedastic Diffusion for Multi-Agent Trajectory Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10717/) (2026)
- [Compatible Transformer for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11022/) (2023)
- [Semantic and Articulated Pedestrian Sensing Onboard a Moving Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06313/) (2023)
- [Relation Learning and Aggregate-attention for Multi-person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03729/) (2024)
- [UnityGraph: Unified Learning of Spatio-temporal features for Multi-person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04151/) (2024)
- [MoMBS: Mixed-order minibatch sampling enhances model training from diverse-quality images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18741/) (2025)
- [Spatiotemporal-Untrammelled Mixture of Experts for Multi-Person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21707/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic Uncertainties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29362/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In multi-modal multi-agent trajectory forecasting, two major challenges have not been fully tackled: 1) how to measure the uncertainty brought by the interaction module that causes correlations among the predicted trajectories of multiple agents; 2) how to rank the multiple predictions and select the optimal predicted trajectory. In order to handle these challenges, this work first proposes a novel concept, collaborative uncertainty (CU), which models the uncertainty resulting from interaction modules. Then we build a general CU-aware regression framework with an original permutation-equivariant uncertainty estimator to do both tasks of regression and uncertainty estimation. Further, we apply the proposed framework to current SOTA multi-agent multi-modal forecasting systems as a plugin module, which enables the SOTA systems to 1) estimate the uncertainty in the multi-agent multi-modal trajectory forecasting task; 2) rank the multiple predictions and select the optimal one based on the estimated uncertainty. We conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and two public large-scale multi-agent trajectory forecasting benchmarks. Experiments show that: 1) on the synthetic dataset, the CU-aware regression framework allows the model to appropriately approximate the ground-truth Laplace distribution; 2) on the multi-agent trajectory forecasting benchmarks, the CU-aware regression framework steadily helps SOTA systems improve their performances. Specially, the proposed framework helps VectorNet improve by 262 cm regarding the Final Displacement Error of the chosen optimal prediction on the nuScenes dataset; 3) for multi-agent multi-modal trajectory forecasting systems, prediction uncertainty is positively correlated with future stochasticity; and 4) the estimated CU values are highly related to the interactive information among agents.