# TrafficBots V1.5: Traffic Simulation via Conditional VAEs and Transformers with Relative Pose Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [Wayformer: Motion Forecasting via Simple & Efficient Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05844/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Urban Driving by Imitating a Reinforcement Learning Coach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08265/) (2021)
- [TrafficSim: Learning to Simulate Realistic Multi-Agent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06557/) (2021)
- [Imitation Is Not Enough: Robustifying Imitation with Reinforcement Learning for Challenging Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11419/) (2022)
- [Implicit Latent Variable Model for Scene-Consistent Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12036/) (2020)
- [The Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12032/) (2023)
- [GoRela: Go Relative for Viewpoint-Invariant Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02545/) (2022)
- [TrafficBots: Towards World Models for Autonomous Driving Simulation and Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04116/) (2023)
- [BehaviorGPT: Smart Agent Simulation for Autonomous Driving with Next-Patch Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17372/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Motion Prediction via Heterogeneous Polyline Transformer with Relative Pose Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12970/) (2023)
- [Multiverse Transformer: 1st Place Solution for Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11868/) (2023)
- [SMART: Scalable Multi-agent Real-time Motion Generation via Next-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15677/) (2024)
- [Learning Realistic Traffic Agents in Closed-loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01394/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Tokenized Traffic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05334/) (2024)
- [KiGRAS: Kinematic-Driven Generative Model for Realistic Agent Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12940/) (2024)
- [DRoPE: Directional Rotary Position Embedding for Efficient Agent Interaction Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15029/) (2025)
- [Highly Accurate and Diverse Traffic Data: The DeepScenario Open 3D Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17371/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08854/) (2025)
- [When Planners Meet Reality: How Learned, Reactive Traffic Agents Shift nuPlan Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14677/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Meta-Actions for Unified Controllable Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23612/) (2025)
- [Long-term Traffic Simulation with Interleaved Autoregressive Motion and Scenario Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17213/) (2025)
- [SceneStreamer: Continuous Scenario Generation as Next Token Group Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23316/) (2025)
- [SCORP: Scene-Consistent Multi-agent Diffusion Planning with Stable Online Reinforcement Post-Training for Cooperative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11734/) (2026)
- [RLFTSim: Realistic and Controllable Multi-Agent Traffic Simulation via Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19033/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Efficient Vehicle Dynamics Modeling via Analytic World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10012/) (2025)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Modeling and Simulation of Mixed Automated and Human Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12857/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this technical report we present TrafficBots V1.5, a baseline method for the closed-loop simulation of traffic agents. TrafficBots V1.5 achieves baseline-level performance and a 3rd place ranking in the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC) 2024. It is a simple baseline that combines TrafficBots, a CVAE-based multi-agent policy conditioned on each agent's individual destination and personality, and HPTR, the heterogeneous polyline transformer with relative pose encoding. To improve the performance on the WOSAC leaderboard, we apply scheduled teacher-forcing at the training time and we filter the sampled scenarios at the inference time. The code is available at https://github.com/zhejz/TrafficBotsV1.5.