# Distilling Knowledge for Short-to-Long Term Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08514/) (2020)
- [From Goals, Waypoints & Paths To Long Term Human Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01526/) (2020)
- [GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01827/) (2021)
- [The inD Dataset: A Drone Dataset of Naturalistic Road User Trajectories at German Intersections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07602/) (2019)
- [Human Trajectory Forecasting in Crowds: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03639/) (2020)
- [SR-LSTM: State Refinement for LSTM towards Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02793/) (2019)
- [Trajectory Forecasts in Unknown Environments Conditioned on Grid-Based Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00735/) (2020)
- [MANTRA: Memory Augmented Networks for Multiple Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03340/) (2020)
- [GoRela: Go Relative for Viewpoint-Invariant Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02545/) (2022)
- [MG-GAN: A Multi-Generator Model Preventing Out-of-Distribution Samples in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09274/) (2021)
- [Trajectron++: Dynamically-Feasible Trajectory Forecasting With Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03093/) (2020)
- [LOKI: Long Term and Key Intentions for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08236/) (2021)
- [Conditional Flow Variational Autoencoders for Structured Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09008/) (2019)
- [Graph-Based Spatial-Temporal Convolutional Network for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12764/) (2021)
- [How many Observations are Enough? Knowledge Distillation for Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04781/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SingularTrajectory: Universal Trajectory Predictor Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18452/) (2024)
- [Continuous Locomotive Crowd Behavior Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04756/) (2025)
- [CCF: Cross Correcting Framework for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00749/) (2024)
- [VISTA: A Vision and Intent-Aware Social Attention Framework for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10203/) (2025)
- [MUSCLE-NET: Predicted-Multiscale-Aware Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00471/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term trajectory forecasting is an important and challenging problem in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. One fundamental difficulty stands in the evolution of the trajectory that becomes more and more uncertain and unpredictable as the time horizon grows, subsequently increasing the complexity of the problem. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose Di-Long, a new method that employs the distillation of a short-term trajectory model forecaster that guides a student network for long-term trajectory prediction during the training process. Given a total sequence length that comprehends the allowed observation for the student network and the complementary target sequence, we let the student and the teacher solve two different related tasks defined over the same full trajectory: the student observes a short sequence and predicts a long trajectory, whereas the teacher observes a longer sequence and predicts the remaining short target trajectory. The teacher's task is less uncertain, and we use its accurate predictions to guide the student through our knowledge distillation framework, reducing long-term future uncertainty. Our experiments show that our proposed Di-Long method is effective for long-term forecasting and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Intersection Drone Dataset (inD) and the Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD).