# Uncertainty-Aware Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction via Distributional Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Importance Weighted Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00519/) (2015)
- [MultiPath: Multiple Probabilistic Anchor Trajectory Hypotheses for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05449/) (2019)
- [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)
- [VAE with a VampPrior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07120/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13777/) (2022)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Adversarial Variational Bayes: Unifying Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04722/) (2017)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)

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

- [DICE: Diverse Diffusion Model with Scoring for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14570/) (2023)
- [Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: Progress, Limitations, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03262/) (2025)
- [SocialCircle+: Learning the Angle-based Conditioned Interaction Representation for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14984/) (2024)
- [Resonance: Learning to Predict Social-Aware Pedestrian Trajectories as Co-Vibrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02447/) (2024)
- [Who Walks With You Matters: Perceiving Social Interactions with Groups for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02395/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Multi-Agent Human Trajectory Prediction: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14831/) (2025)
- [Reverberation: Learning the Latencies Before Forecasting Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11164/) (2025)
- [Multi-agent Traffic Prediction via Denoised Endpoint Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07041/) (2024)
- [UBMF: Uncertainty-Aware Bayesian Meta-Learning Framework for Fault Diagnosis with Imbalanced Industrial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11774/) (2025)
- [KoopCast: Trajectory Forecasting via Koopman Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15513/) (2025)
- [Encore: Conditioning Trajectory Forecasting via Biased Ego Rehearsals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11463/) (2026)
- [A Unified Framework for Trajectory Prediction with Explicit Planning and Reaction Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05673/) (2026)
- [GEAR: From Dynamic Encoding to Dynamic Activation in Social Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13778/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tremendous efforts have been put forth on predicting pedestrian trajectory with generative models to accommodate uncertainty and multi-modality in human behaviors. An individual's inherent uncertainty, e.g., change of destination, can be masked by complex patterns resulting from the movements of interacting pedestrians. However, latent variable-based generative models often entangle such uncertainty with complexity, leading to limited either latent expressivity or predictive diversity. In this work, we propose to separately model these two factors by implicitly deriving a flexible latent representation to capture intricate pedestrian movements, while integrating predictive uncertainty of individuals with explicit bivariate Gaussian mixture densities over their future locations. More specifically, we present a model-agnostic uncertainty-aware pedestrian trajectory prediction framework, parameterizing sufficient statistics for the mixture of Gaussians that jointly comprise the multi-modal trajectories. We further estimate these parameters of interest by approximating a denoising process that progressively recovers pedestrian movements from noise. Unlike previous studies, we translate the predictive stochasticity to explicit distributions, allowing it to readily generate plausible future trajectories indicating individuals' self-uncertainty. Moreover, our framework is compatible with different neural net architectures. We empirically show the performance gains over state-of-the-art even with lighter backbones, across most scenes on two public benchmarks.