# GoIRL: Graph-Oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21121/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation and offline RL for driving, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 43 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Imitation and offline RL for driving](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/imitation-and-offline-rl-for-driving/)

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

- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [VectorNet: Encoding HD Maps and Agent Dynamics from Vectorized Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04259/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06711/) (2018)
- [Guided Cost Learning: Deep Inverse Optimal Control via Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00448/) (2016)
- [Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13732/) (2020)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MultiPath++: Efficient Information Fusion and Trajectory Aggregation for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14973/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Interpretable Neural Motion Planner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06679/) (2021)
- [A Connection between Generative Adversarial Networks, Inverse Reinforcement Learning, and Energy-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03852/) (2016)
- [GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01827/) (2021)
- [Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers For Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00563/) (2021)
- [HOME: Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10968/) (2021)
- [LaneRCNN: Distributed Representations for Graph-Centric Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06653/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Conditioned on Lane-Graph Traversals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15004/) (2021)
- [THOMAS: Trajectory Heatmap Output with learned Multi-Agent Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06607/) (2021)
- [TPCN: Temporal Point Cloud Networks for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03067/) (2021)
- [Trajectory Forecasts in Unknown Environments Conditioned on Grid-Based Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00735/) (2020)
- [Learning to Predict Vehicle Trajectories with Model-based Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04027/) (2021)
- [Meta-Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Probabilistic Context Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09314/) (2019)

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

- [Advancing Multi-agent Traffic Simulation via R1-Style Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23993/) (2025)
- [ColaVLA: Leveraging Cognitive Latent Reasoning for Hierarchical Parallel Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22939/) (2025)
- [Foresight in Motion: Reinforcing Trajectory Prediction with Reward Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12083/) (2025)
- [VG3S: Visual Geometry Grounded Gaussian Splatting for Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06210/) (2026)
- [ST-GS: Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Spatial-Temporal Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16552/) (2025)
- [Adapter-Augmented Bandits for Online Multi-Constrained Multi-Modal Inference Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06403/) (2026)
- [ILNet: Trajectory Prediction with Inverse Learning Attention for Enhancing Intention Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06531/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trajectory prediction for surrounding agents is a challenging task in autonomous driving due to its inherent uncertainty and underlying multimodality. Unlike prevailing data-driven methods that primarily rely on supervised learning, in this paper, we introduce a novel Graph-oriented Inverse Reinforcement Learning (GoIRL) framework, which is an IRL-based predictor equipped with vectorized context representations. We develop a feature adaptor to effectively aggregate lane-graph features into grid space, enabling seamless integration with the maximum entropy IRL paradigm to infer the reward distribution and obtain the policy that can be sampled to induce multiple plausible plans. Furthermore, conditioned on the sampled plans, we implement a hierarchical parameterized trajectory generator with a refinement module to enhance prediction accuracy and a probability fusion strategy to boost prediction confidence. Extensive experimental results showcase our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale Argoverse & nuScenes motion forecasting benchmarks but also exhibits superior generalization abilities compared to existing supervised models.