# GUIDE-CoT: Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for Pedestrian Trajectory using Chain-of-Thought

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 6 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Reasoning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11562/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TrajEvo: Designing Trajectory Prediction Heuristics via LLM-driven Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04480/) (2025)
- [TrajEvo: Trajectory Prediction Heuristics Design via LLM-driven Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05616/) (2025)
- [Large Foundation Models for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10570/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Numerical Forecasting Models for Language-Based Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07954/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive results in reasoning tasks, their application to pedestrian trajectory prediction remains challenging due to two key limitations: insufficient use of visual information and the difficulty of predicting entire trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for pedestrian trajectory using Chain-of-Thought (GUIDE-CoT). Our approach integrates two innovative modules: (1) a goal-oriented visual prompt, which enhances goal prediction accuracy combining visual prompts with a pretrained visual encoder, and (2) a chain-of-thought (CoT) LLM for trajectory generation, which generates realistic trajectories toward the predicted goal. Moreover, our method introduces controllable trajectory generation, allowing for flexible and user-guided modifications to the predicted paths. Through extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY benchmark datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering both high accuracy and greater adaptability in pedestrian trajectory prediction. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ai-kmu/GUIDE-CoT.