# G2LTraj: A Global-to-Local Generation Approach for Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19330 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19330/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13504/) (2022)
- [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)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [Motion Transformer with Global Intention Localization and Local Movement Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13508/) (2022)
- [MultiPath++: Efficient Information Fusion and Trajectory Aggregation for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14973/) (2021)
- [It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02025/) (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)
- [Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers For Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00563/) (2021)
- [HDGT: Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction via Scene Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09753/) (2022)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)
- [MUSE-VAE: Multi-Scale VAE for Environment-Aware Long Term Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07189/) (2022)
- [On Exposing the Challenging Long Tail in Future Prediction of Traffic Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12474/) (2021)
- [EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09306/) (2023)
- [ADAPT: Efficient Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction with Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14187/) (2023)
- [Personalized Trajectory Prediction via Distribution Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14204/) (2021)
- [SMEMO: Social Memory for Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12446/) (2022)
- [Social Interpretable Tree for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13296/) (2022)
- [Social-PatteRNN: Socially-Aware Trajectory Prediction Guided by Motion Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05649/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Generalizable Physics-Enhanced State Space Model for Long-Term Dynamics Forecasting in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10792/) (2025)
- [A Generalizable Physics-guided Causal Model for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13936/) (2026)
- [MoE-Enhanced Multi-Domain Feature Selection and Fusion for Fast Map-Free Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02368/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting future trajectories of traffic agents accurately holds substantial importance in various applications such as autonomous driving. Previous methods commonly infer all future steps of an agent either recursively or simultaneously. However, the recursive strategy suffers from the accumulated error, while the simultaneous strategy overlooks the constraints among future steps, resulting in kinematically infeasible predictions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose G2LTraj, a plug-and-play global-to-local generation approach for trajectory prediction. Specifically, we generate a series of global key steps that uniformly cover the entire future time range. Subsequently, the local intermediate steps between the adjacent key steps are recursively filled in. In this way, we prevent the accumulated error from propagating beyond the adjacent key steps. Moreover, to boost the kinematical feasibility, we not only introduce the spatial constraints among key steps but also strengthen the temporal constraints among the intermediate steps. Finally, to ensure the optimal granularity of key steps, we design a selectable granularity strategy that caters to each predicted trajectory. Our G2LTraj significantly improves the performance of seven existing trajectory predictors across the ETH, UCY and nuScenes datasets. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/G2LTraj.