# Map-Free Trajectory Prediction with Map Distillation and Hierarchical Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10961 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10961/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (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)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13732/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [MultiPath++: Efficient Information Fusion and Trajectory Aggregation for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14973/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03083/) (2023)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16534/) (2023)
- [MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17770/) (2023)
- [Online Knowledge Distillation with Diverse Peers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00350/) (2019)
- [Forecast-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training for Motion Forecasting with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09882/) (2023)
- [Peer Collaborative Learning for Online Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04147/) (2020)
- [Online Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02092/) (2021)
- [LAformer: Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Lane-Aware Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13933/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [GContextFormer: A global context-aware hybrid multi-head attention approach with scaled additive aggregation for multimodal trajectory prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18874/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reliable motion forecasting of surrounding agents is essential for ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. Many existing trajectory prediction methods rely heavily on high-definition (HD) maps as strong driving priors. However, the availability and accuracy of these priors are not guaranteed due to substantial costs to build, localization errors of vehicles, or ongoing road constructions. In this paper, we introduce MFTP, a Map-Free Trajectory Prediction method that offers several advantages. First, it eliminates the need for HD maps during inference while still benefiting from map priors during training via knowledge distillation. Second, we present a novel hierarchical encoder that effectively extracts spatial-temporal agent features and aggregates them into multiple trajectory queries. Additionally, we introduce an iterative decoder that sequentially decodes trajectory queries to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse dataset under the map-free setting.