# PBP: Path-based Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03750/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 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 7 Sep 2023.

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

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Interactive Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving : The Waymo Open Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10133/) (2021)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [NuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11810/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Predictions for Autonomous Driving using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10732/) (2018)
- [Wayformer: Motion Forecasting via Simple & Efficient Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05844/) (2022)
- [CoverNet: Multimodal Behavior Prediction using Trajectory Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10298/) (2019)
- [MultiPath++: Efficient Information Fusion and Trajectory Aggregation for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14973/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [HOME: Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10968/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TPCN: Temporal Point Cloud Networks for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03067/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Short-term Motion Prediction of Traffic Actors for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05819/) (2018)
- [What-If Motion Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10587/) (2020)
- [Learning to Predict Vehicle Trajectories with Model-based Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04027/) (2021)
- [ProphNet: Efficient Agent-Centric Motion Forecasting with Anchor-Informed Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12071/) (2023)

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

- [GoIRL: Graph-Oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21121/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Meta-Actions for Unified Controllable Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23612/) (2025)
- [A Generalizable Physics-guided Causal Model for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13936/) (2026)
- [BEVTraj: Map-Free End-to-End Trajectory Prediction in Bird's-Eye View with Deformable Attention and Sparse Goal Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10080/) (2025)
- [TreeIRL: Safe Urban Driving with Tree Search and Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13579/) (2025)
- [SD-RouteFusion: Ego-Trajectory Prediction with SD-Map Route Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01139/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trajectory prediction plays a crucial role in the autonomous driving stack by enabling autonomous vehicles to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents. Goal-based prediction models have gained traction in recent years for addressing the multimodal nature of future trajectories. Goal-based prediction models simplify multimodal prediction by first predicting 2D goal locations of agents and then predicting trajectories conditioned on each goal. However, a single 2D goal location serves as a weak inductive bias for predicting the whole trajectory, often leading to poor map compliance, i.e., part of the trajectory going off-road or breaking traffic rules. In this paper, we improve upon goal-based prediction by proposing the Path-based prediction (PBP) approach. PBP predicts a discrete probability distribution over reference paths in the HD map using the path features and predicts trajectories in the path-relative Frenet frame. We applied the PBP trajectory decoder on top of the HiVT scene encoder and report results on the Argoverse dataset. Our experiments show that PBP achieves competitive performance on the standard trajectory prediction metrics, while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in terms of map compliance.