# Recover to Predict: Progressive Retrospective Learning for Variable-Length Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [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)
- [TNT: Target-driveN Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08294/) (2020)
- [DenseTNT: End-to-end Trajectory Prediction from Dense Goal Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09640/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MultiPath++: Efficient Information Fusion and Trajectory Aggregation for Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14973/) (2021)
- [MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03083/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Motion Prediction with Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11624/) (2021)
- [MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16534/) (2023)
- [GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01827/) (2021)
- [GameFormer: Game-theoretic Modeling and Learning of Transformer-based Interactive Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05760/) (2023)
- [MTR++: Multi-Agent Motion Prediction with Symmetric Scene Modeling and Guided Intention Querying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17770/) (2023)
- [HOME: Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10968/) (2021)
- [HDGT: Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction via Scene Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09753/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Multi-Head Attention for Multi-Modal Joint Vehicle Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03650/) (2019)
- [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)
- [End-to-end Contextual Perception and Prediction with Interaction Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05927/) (2020)
- [GANet: Goal Area Network for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09723/) (2022)
- [ProphNet: Efficient Agent-Centric Motion Forecasting with Anchor-Informed Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12071/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LoRFT: Benchmarking Long-Range Vehicle Trajectory Reconstruction from Fixed Highway Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19911/) (2026)
- [ExPhy: A Benchmark for Explicit Physical Property Learning in Multi-Object Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20009/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trajectory prediction is critical for autonomous driving, enabling safe and efficient planning in dense, dynamic traffic. Most existing methods optimize prediction accuracy under fixed-length observations. However, real-world driving often yields variable-length, incomplete observations, posing a challenge to these methods. A common strategy is to directly map features from incomplete observations to those from complete ones. This one-shot mapping, however, struggles to learn accurate representations for short trajectories due to significant information gaps. To address this issue, we propose a Progressive Retrospective Framework (PRF), which gradually aligns features from incomplete observations with those from complete ones via a cascade of retrospective units. Each unit consists of a Retrospective Distillation Module (RDM) and a Retrospective Prediction Module (RPM), where RDM distills features and RPM recovers previous timesteps using the distilled features. Moreover, we propose a Rolling-Start Training Strategy (RSTS) that enhances data efficiency during PRF training. PRF is plug-and-play with existing methods. Extensive experiments on datasets Argoverse 2 and Argoverse 1 demonstrate the effectiveness of PRF. Code is available at https://github.com/zhouhao94/PRF.