# DONUT: A Decoder-Only Model for Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06854/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13732/) (2020)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [TNT: Target-driveN Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08294/) (2020)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [DESIRE: Distant Future Prediction in Dynamic Scenes with Interacting Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04394/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Predictions for Autonomous Driving using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10732/) (2018)
- [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)
- [CoverNet: Multimodal Behavior Prediction using Trajectory Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10298/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Motion Prediction with Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11624/) (2021)
- [Multiple Futures Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00997/) (2019)
- [Scene Transformer: A unified architecture for predicting multiple agent trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08417/) (2021)
- [MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16534/) (2023)
- [HOME: Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10968/) (2021)
- [Rules of the Road: Predicting Driving Behavior with a Convolutional Model of Semantic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08945/) (2019)
- [LaneRCNN: Distributed Representations for Graph-Centric Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06653/) (2021)
- [THOMAS: Trajectory Heatmap Output with learned Multi-Agent Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06607/) (2021)
- [The Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12032/) (2023)
- [Forecast-MAE: Self-supervised Pre-training for Motion Forecasting with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09882/) (2023)
- [GoRela: Go Relative for Viewpoint-Invariant Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02545/) (2022)
- [Trajeglish: Traffic Modeling as Next-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04535/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Unified Prediction and Planning via Conflict-Aware Disjoint Parameter Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19971/) (2026)
- [TaPD: Temporal-adaptive Progressive Distillation for Observation-Adaptive Trajectory Forecasting in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06231/) (2026)
- [ECTraj: Enhanced Consistency Training for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08572/) (2026)
- [Reasonable Motion: A General ASP Foundation for Environment Constrained Movement Trajectory Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25626/) (2026)
- [Towards Metric-Agnostic Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01133/) (2026)
- [A Unified Framework for Trajectory Prediction with Explicit Planning and Reaction Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05673/) (2026)
- [MoCAR: Motion-code Coordinate-aware AutoRegression for Continuous Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting the motion of other agents in a scene is highly relevant for autonomous driving, as it allows a self-driving car to anticipate. Inspired by the success of decoder-only models for language modeling, we propose DONUT, a Decoder-Only Network for Unrolling Trajectories. Unlike existing encoder-decoder forecasting models, we encode historical trajectories and predict future trajectories with a single autoregressive model. This allows the model to make iterative predictions in a consistent manner, and ensures that the model is always provided with up-to-date information, thereby enhancing performance. Furthermore, inspired by multi-token prediction for language modeling, we introduce an 'overprediction' strategy that gives the model the auxiliary task of predicting trajectories at longer temporal horizons. This allows the model to better anticipate the future and further improves performance. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our decoder-only approach outperforms the encoder-decoder baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Argoverse 2 single-agent motion forecasting benchmark.