# Unified Spatial-Temporal Edge-Enhanced Graph Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02504/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14491/) (2021)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [Social-BiGAT: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting using Bicycle-GAN and Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03395/) (2019)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [FourierGNN: Rethinking Multivariate Time Series Forecasting from a Pure Graph Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06190/) (2023)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)
- [Understanding Oversquashing in GNNs through the Lens of Effective Resistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06835/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SocialVAE: Human Trajectory Prediction using Timewise Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08207/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Trajectory Prediction via Transferable GNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05046/) (2022)
- [Uncovering the Missing Pattern: Unified Framework Towards Trajectory Imputation and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16005/) (2023)
- [Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13378/) (2023)
- [Learning Pedestrian Group Representations for Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09953/) (2022)
- [EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09306/) (2023)
- [Social-Implicit: Rethinking Trajectory Prediction Evaluation and The Effectiveness of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03057/) (2022)
- [SingularTrajectory: Universal Trajectory Predictor Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18452/) (2024)

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

- [Rethinking Brain Tumor Segmentation from the Frequency Domain Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10142/) (2025)
- [FineCausal: A Causal-Based Framework for Interpretable Fine-Grained Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23911/) (2025)
- [ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12214/) (2025)
- [Geometric Visual Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Person Human-Object Interaction Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03440/) (2025)
- [vMFCoOp: Towards Equilibrium on a Unified Hyperspherical Manifold for Prompting Biomedical VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09540/) (2025)
- [Recent Advances in Multi-Agent Human Trajectory Prediction: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14831/) (2025)
- [Motion-Adaptive Multi-Scale Temporal Modelling with Skeleton-Constrained Spatial Graphs for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03652/) (2026)
- [ART: Adaptive Relational Transformer for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Temporal-Aware Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03649/) (2026)
- [You Only Look Omni Gradient Backpropagation for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13013/) (2025)
- [SAIL: Scene-aware Adaptive Iterative Learning for Long-Tail Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04573/) (2026)
- [Encore: Conditioning Trajectory Forecasting via Biased Ego Rehearsals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11463/) (2026)
- [HSTGFormer: Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12187/) (2026)
- [STARS: From Spatiotemporal Dynamics to Social Representations in Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.40245/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pedestrian trajectory prediction aims to forecast future movements based on historical paths. Spatial-temporal (ST) methods often separately model spatial interactions among pedestrians and temporal dependencies of individuals. They overlook the direct impacts of interactions among different pedestrians across various time steps (i.e., high-order cross-time interactions). This limits their ability to capture ST inter-dependencies and hinders prediction performance. To address these limitations, we propose UniEdge with three major designs. Firstly, we introduce a unified ST graph data structure that simplifies high-order cross-time interactions into first-order relationships, enabling the learning of ST inter-dependencies in a single step. This avoids the information loss caused by multi-step aggregation. Secondly, traditional GNNs focus on aggregating pedestrian node features, neglecting the propagation of implicit interaction patterns encoded in edge features. We propose the Edge-to-Edge-Node-to-Node Graph Convolution (E2E-N2N-GCN), a novel dual-graph network that jointly models explicit N2N social interactions among pedestrians and implicit E2E influence propagation across these interaction patterns. Finally, to overcome the limited receptive fields and challenges in capturing long-range dependencies of auto-regressive architectures, we introduce a transformer encoder-based predictor that enables global modeling of temporal correlation. UniEdge outperforms state-of-the-arts on multiple datasets, including ETH, UCY, and SDD.