# WAY: Estimation of Vessel Destination in Worldwide AIS Trajectory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13190/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Methods for Vessel Trajectory Prediction based on Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02486/) (2021)
- [A Multi-task Deep Learning Architecture for Maritime Surveillance using AIS Data Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03972/) (2018)
- [Moving Objects Analytics: Survey on Future Location & Trajectory Prediction Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04639/) (2018)
- [An Automatic Identification System (AIS) Database for Maritime Trajectory Prediction and Data Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03306/) (2016)

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

- [A Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer for Multi-Step Port-of-Call Sequence Prediction in Global Liner Shipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) enables data-driven maritime surveillance but suffers from reliability issues and irregular intervals. We address vessel destination estimation using global-scope AIS data by proposing a differentiated approach that recasts long port-to-port trajectories as a nested sequence structure. Using spatial grids, this method mitigates spatio-temporal bias while preserving detailed resolution. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture, WAY, designed to process these reformulated trajectories for long-term destination estimation days to weeks in advance. WAY comprises a trajectory representation layer and Channel-Aggregative Sequential Processing (CASP) blocks. The representation layer generates multi-channel vector sequences from kinematic and non-kinematic features. CASP blocks utilize multi-headed channel- and self-attention for aggregation and sequential information delivery. Additionally, we propose a task-specialized Gradient Dropout (GD) technique to enable many-to-many training on single labels, preventing biased feedback surges by stochastically blocking gradient flow based on sample length. Experiments on 5-year AIS data demonstrate WAY's superiority over conventional spatial grid-based approaches regardless of trajectory progression. Results further confirm that adopting GD leads to performance gains. Finally, we explore WAY's potential for real-world application through multitask learning for ETA estimation.