Forecasting Motion in the Wild
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Visual intelligence requires anticipating the future behavior of agents, yet vision systems lack a general representation for motion and behavior. We propose dense point trajectories as visual tokens for behavior, a structured mid-level representation that disentangles motion from appearance and generalizes across diverse non-rigid agents, such as animals in-the-wild. Building on this abstraction, we design a diffusion transformer that models unordered sets of trajectories and explicitly reasons about occlusion, enabling coherent forecasts of complex motion patterns. To evaluate at scale, we curate 300 hours of unconstrained animal video with robust shot detection and camera-motion compensation. Experiments show that forecasting trajectory tokens achieves category-agnostic, data-efficient prediction, outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and generalizes to rare species and morphologies, providing a foundation for predictive visual intelligence in the wild.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 55 of its 90 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.
Builds on
55 of 90 references.
References · 55
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,274
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,784
- 2023Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasetscited by 2,526
- 2025VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformercited by 1,475
- 2025DINOv3cited by 1,297
- 2018Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 687
- 2017MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generationcited by 523
- 2023CoTracker: It is Better to Track Togethercited by 516
- 2015Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMscited by 434
38 more
- 2022Kubric: A scalable dataset generatorcited by 373
- 20163D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animalscited by 310
- 2017DESIRE: Distant Future Prediction in Dynamic Scenes with Interacting Agentscited by 310
- 2023Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 304
- 2023TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinementcited by 281
- 2020It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Predictioncited by 235
- 2019Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Surveycited by 231
- 2024VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generationcited by 215
- 2023Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learningcited by 207
- 2024How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspectivecited by 204
- 2018Markerless tracking of user-defined features with deep learningcited by 203
- 2017Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowdscited by 185
- 2018Stochastic Adversarial Video Predictioncited by 173
- 2023MotionLM: Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting as Language Modelingcited by 154
- 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 142
- 2022Diffusion Models for Video Prediction and Infillingcited by 134
- 2024Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interfacecited by 126
- 2024Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 116
- 2024BootsTAP: Bootstrapped Training for Tracking-Any-Pointcited by 115
- 2020A Review on Deep Learning Techniques for Video Predictioncited by 114
- 2025VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Modelscited by 112
- 2022MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wildcited by 111
- 2019Three-D Safari: Learning to Estimate Zebra Pose, Shape, and Texture from Images "In the Wild"cited by 106
- 2014Video (language) modeling: a baseline for generative models of natural videoscited by 92
- 2024General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learningcited by 80
- 2024Fr'echet Video Motion Distance: A Metric for Evaluating Motion Consistency in Videoscited by 54
- 2023Seer: Language Instructed Video Prediction with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 51
- 2022SuperAnimal pretrained pose estimation models for behavioral analysiscited by 38
- 2023MammalNet: A Large-scale Video Benchmark for Mammal Recognition and Behavior Understandingcited by 35
- 2025TAPNext: Tracking Any Point (TAP) as Next Token Predictioncited by 35
- 2025Pre-training Auto-regressive Robotic Models with 4D Representationscited by 27
- 2023Robots That Can See: Leveraging Human Pose for Trajectory Predictioncited by 22
- 2023Ponymation: Learning Articulated 3D Animal Motions from Unlabeled Online Videoscited by 21
- 2024AID: Adapting Image2Video Diffusion Models for Instruction-guided Video Predictioncited by 20
- 2024VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptionscited by 18
- 2024Tra-MoE: Learning Trajectory Prediction Model from Multiple Domains for Adaptive Policy Conditioningcited by 18
- 2023Video Diffusion Models with Local-Global Context Guidancecited by 15
- 2023STDiff: Spatio-temporal Diffusion for Continuous Stochastic Video Predictioncited by 12
50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instructioncited by 3
- 2026μ0: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Modelcited by 2
- 2026Learning Long-term Motion Embeddings for Efficient Kinematics Generationcited by 1
- 2026MotionForesight: Re-purposing Video Models for Future 3D Scene-Flow Predictioncited by 1
- 2026MotionForesight: Re-purposing Video Models for Future 3D Scene-Flow Prediction17 Jul 2026
- 2026MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction17 Jun 2026
- 2026μ0: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model11 Jun 2026
- 2026Learning Long-term Motion Embeddings for Efficient Kinematics Generation13 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Envisioning the Future, One Step at a Time
- 2026Foresight Without Seeing: Latent Futures for World Action Models
- 2026UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation
- 2026MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models
- 2026FoMoVLA: Bridging Visual Foresight and Motion Guidance for Vision-Language-Action Models
- 2026TrajLoom: Dense Future Trajectory Generation from Video
- 2025AstraNav-World: World Model for Foresight Control and Consistency
- 2025PlaySlot: Learning Inverse Latent Dynamics for Controllable Object-Centric Video Prediction and Planning