# SIMPL: A Simple and Efficient Multi-agent Motion Prediction Baseline for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [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)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (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)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [Scene Transformer: A unified architecture for predicting multiple agent trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08417/) (2021)
- [MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17770/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)
- [Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers For Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00563/) (2021)
- [Implicit Latent Variable Model for Scene-Consistent Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12036/) (2020)
- [HDGT: Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction via Scene Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09753/) (2022)
- [Forecast-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training for Motion Forecasting with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09882/) (2023)
- [GoRela: Go Relative for Viewpoint-Invariant Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02545/) (2022)
- [SSL-Lanes: Self-Supervised Learning for Motion Forecasting in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14116/) (2022)
- [MacFormer: Map-Agent Coupled Transformer for Real-time and Robust Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10280/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Scenario Representation Learning for Motion Forecasting with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04364/) (2023)
- [R-Pred: Two-Stage Motion Prediction Via Tube-Query Attention-Based Trajectory Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08609/) (2022)
- [PLOP: Probabilistic poLynomial Objects trajectory Planning for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08744/) (2020)
- [Trajectory Prediction with Graph-based Dual-scale Context Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01592/) (2021)

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

- [Motion Forecasting in Continuous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06007/) (2024)
- [Efficient Motion Prediction: A Lightweight & Accurate Trajectory Prediction Model With Fast Training and Inference Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16154/) (2024)
- [GoIRL: Graph-Oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21121/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction with Difficulty-Guided Feature Enhancement Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18551/) (2024)
- [Foresight in Motion: Reinforcing Trajectory Prediction with Reward Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12083/) (2025)
- [Divide and Merge: Motion and Semantic Learning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07631/) (2025)
- [Dur360BEV: A Real-world 360-degree Single Camera Dataset and Benchmark for Bird-Eye View Mapping in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00675/) (2025)
- [ParkDiffusion: Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Multi-Modal Trajectory Prediction for Automated Parking using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00586/) (2025)
- [Future-Aware Interaction Network For Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06565/) (2025)
- [Do LLM Modules Generalize? A Study on Motion Generation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02754/) (2025)
- [Snapshot: Towards Application-centered Models for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Urban Traffic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01971/) (2024)
- [HAMF: A Hybrid Attention-Mamba Framework for Joint Scene Context Understanding and Future Motion Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15703/) (2025)
- [KD360-VoxelBEV: LiDAR and 360-degree Camera Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15311/) (2025)
- [Recover to Predict: Progressive Retrospective Learning for Variable-Length Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10597/) (2026)
- [Toward Efficient and Robust Behavior Models for Multi-Agent Driving Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05812/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Flow Matching for Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22688/) (2025)
- [Streaming Real-Time Trajectory Prediction Using Endpoint-Aware Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01864/) (2026)
- [From Marginal to Joint Predictions: Evaluating Scene-Consistent Trajectory Prediction Approaches for Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05254/) (2025)
- [ILNet: Trajectory Prediction with Inverse Learning Attention for Enhancing Intention Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06531/) (2025)
- [Cued-Agent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent System for Automatic Cued Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00391/) (2025)
- [TaPD: Temporal-adaptive Progressive Distillation for Observation-Adaptive Trajectory Forecasting in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06231/) (2026)
- [SHARP: Short-Window Streaming for Accurate and Robust Prediction in Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28091/) (2026)
- [Recall to Predict: Grounding Motion Forecasting in Interpretable Motion Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01393/) (2026)
- [A Pedestrian-Vehicle Interaction Benchmark and Annotation Framework for Unstructured Scenes via Uncalibrated Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25947/) (2026)
- [Mind the Noise: Sensitivity of Transformer-based Interaction-Aware Trajectory Prediction Models to Noisy Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21344/) (2026)
- [Proposal-Conditioned Latent Diffusion for Closed-Loop Traffic Scenario Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27123/) (2026)
- [A Unified Framework for Trajectory Prediction with Explicit Planning and Reaction Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05673/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a Simple and effIcient Motion Prediction baseLine (SIMPL) for autonomous vehicles. Unlike conventional agent-centric methods with high accuracy but repetitive computations and scene-centric methods with compromised accuracy and generalizability, SIMPL delivers real-time, accurate motion predictions for all relevant traffic participants. To achieve improvements in both accuracy and inference speed, we propose a compact and efficient global feature fusion module that performs directed message passing in a symmetric manner, enabling the network to forecast future motion for all road users in a single feed-forward pass and mitigating accuracy loss caused by viewpoint shifting. Additionally, we investigate the continuous trajectory parameterization using Bernstein basis polynomials in trajectory decoding, allowing evaluations of states and their higher-order derivatives at any desired time point, which is valuable for downstream planning tasks. As a strong baseline, SIMPL exhibits highly competitive performance on Argoverse 1 & 2 motion forecasting benchmarks compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, its lightweight design and low inference latency make SIMPL highly extensible and promising for real-world onboard deployment. We open-source the code at https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/SIMPL.