# SocialCircle: Learning the Angle-based Social Interaction Representation for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05370/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Social Pooling for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06771/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08514/) (2020)
- [Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13777/) (2022)
- [From Goals, Waypoints & Paths To Long Term Human Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01526/) (2020)
- [Scene Transformer: A unified architecture for predicting multiple agent trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08417/) (2021)
- [Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01893/) (2023)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [Human Trajectory Forecasting in Crowds: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03639/) (2020)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07152/) (2021)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)
- [EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10876/) (2023)
- [Remember Intentions: Retrospective-Memory-based Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11474/) (2022)
- [Social Ways: Learning Multi-Modal Distributions of Pedestrian Trajectories with GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09507/) (2019)
- [SocialVAE: Human Trajectory Prediction using Timewise Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08207/) (2022)
- [Human Trajectory Prediction via Neural Social Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10435/) (2022)
- [ScePT: Scene-consistent, Policy-based Trajectory Predictions for Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13387/) (2022)
- [Trajectory Prediction with Latent Belief Energy-Based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03086/) (2021)
- [MUSE-VAE: Multi-Scale VAE for Environment-Aware Long Term Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07189/) (2022)
- [Future Person Localization in First-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11217/) (2017)
- [Collaborative Motion Prediction via Neural Motion Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06594/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [MoFlow: One-Step Flow Matching for Human Trajectory Forecasting via Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation based Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09950/) (2025)
- [Trajectory Mamba: Efficient Attention-Mamba Forecasting Model Based on Selective SSM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10898/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Continuous Locomotive Crowd Behavior Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04756/) (2025)
- [SocialMOIF: Multi-Order Intention Fusion for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15616/) (2025)
- [MGF: Mixed Gaussian Flow for Diverse Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12238/) (2024)
- [Resonance: Learning to Predict Social-Aware Pedestrian Trajectories as Co-Vibrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02447/) (2024)
- [ParkDiffusion: Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Multi-Modal Trajectory Prediction for Automated Parking using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00586/) (2025)
- [Agile Decision-Making and Safety-Critical Motion Planning for Emergency Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08665/) (2024)
- [Who Walks With You Matters: Perceiving Social Interactions with Groups for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02395/) (2024)
- [Modeling 3D Pedestrian-Vehicle Interactions for Vehicle-Conditioned Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08962/) (2026)
- [Remember and Recall: Associative-Memory-based Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02201/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Multi-Agent Human Trajectory Prediction: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14831/) (2025)
- [PMM-Net: Single-stage Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction with Patching-based Embedding and Explicit Modal Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19544/) (2024)
- [Learning Velocity and Acceleration: Self-Supervised Motion Consistency for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24272/) (2025)
- [Out-of-Sight Embodied Agents: Multimodal Tracking, Sensor Fusion, and Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15219/) (2025)
- [Diffusion^2: Dual Diffusion Model with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Noise for Momentary Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04365/) (2025)
- [Addressing Corner Cases in Autonomous Driving: A World Model-based Approach with Mixture of Experts and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21867/) (2025)
- [Reverberation: Learning the Latencies Before Forecasting Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11164/) (2025)
- [Hazy Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction via Physical Priors and Graph-Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24020/) (2025)
- [Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03666/) (2025)
- [SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00120/) (2026)
- [Encore: Conditioning Trajectory Forecasting via Biased Ego Rehearsals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11463/) (2026)
- [A Pedestrian-Vehicle Interaction Benchmark and Annotation Framework for Unstructured Scenes via Uncalibrated Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25947/) (2026)
- [Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18824/) (2026)
- [GEAR: From Dynamic Encoding to Dynamic Activation in Social Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13778/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analyzing and forecasting trajectories of agents like pedestrians and cars in complex scenes has become more and more significant in many intelligent systems and applications. The diversity and uncertainty in socially interactive behaviors among a rich variety of agents make this task more challenging than other deterministic computer vision tasks. Researchers have made a lot of efforts to quantify the effects of these interactions on future trajectories through different mathematical models and network structures, but this problem has not been well solved. Inspired by marine animals that localize the positions of their companions underwater through echoes, we build a new anglebased trainable social interaction representation, named SocialCircle, for continuously reflecting the context of social interactions at different angular orientations relative to the target agent. We validate the effect of the proposed SocialCircle by training it along with several newly released trajectory prediction models, and experiments show that the SocialCircle not only quantitatively improves the prediction performance, but also qualitatively helps better simulate social interactions when forecasting pedestrian trajectories in a way that is consistent with human intuitions.
