# Trajectory Prediction with Observations of Variable-Length for Motion Planning in Highway Merging scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Predictions for Autonomous Driving using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10732/) (2018)
- [The highD Dataset: A Drone Dataset of Naturalistic Vehicle Trajectories on German Highways for Validation of Highly Automated Driving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05642/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Social Pooling for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06771/) (2018)
- [Transformer Networks for Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08111/) (2020)
- [Multiple Futures Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00997/) (2019)
- [LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06547/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multi-modal Motion Prediction with Transformer-based Neural Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06446/) (2021)
- [ScePT: Scene-consistent, Policy-based Trajectory Predictions for Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13387/) (2022)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Prediction of Vehicle Trajectory via LSTM Encoder-Decoder Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06338/) (2018)
- [Graph-Based Spatial-Temporal Convolutional Network for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12764/) (2021)
- [CRAT-Pred: Vehicle Trajectory Prediction with Crystal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and Multi-Head Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04488/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [EgoNav: Egocentric Scene-aware Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19026/) (2024)
- [Prediction Horizon Requirements for Automated Driving: Optimizing Safety, Comfort, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03893/) (2024)
- [Toward Unified Practices in Trajectory Prediction Research on Bird's-Eye-View Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00604/) (2024)
- [STEP: Structured Training and Evaluation Platform for benchmarking trajectory prediction models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14801/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Interaction Modeling for Trajectory Prediction via Agent Selection and Physical Coefficient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13152/) (2024)
- [Towards A General-Purpose Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles Using Fluid Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05708/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate trajectory prediction of nearby vehicles is crucial for the safe motion planning of automated vehicles in dynamic driving scenarios such as highway merging. Existing methods cannot initiate prediction for a vehicle unless observed for a fixed duration of two or more seconds. This prevents a fast reaction by the ego vehicle to vehicles that enter its perception range, thus creating safety concerns. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel transformer-based trajectory prediction approach, specifically trained to handle any observation length larger than one frame. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method using two large-scale highway trajectory datasets, namely the highD and exiD. In addition, we study the impact of the proposed prediction approach on motion planning and control tasks using extensive merging scenarios from the exiD dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first instance where such a large-scale highway merging dataset has been employed for this purpose. The results demonstrate that the prediction model achieves state-of-the-art performance on highD dataset and maintains lower prediction error w.r.t. the constant velocity across all observation lengths in exiD. Moreover, it significantly enhances safety, comfort, and efficiency in dense traffic scenarios, as compared to the constant velocity model.