# Agent-Centric Social Trajectory Prediction: A Free Energy Principle Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25748/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [Efficient Diffusion Training via Min-SNR Weighting Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09556/) (2023)
- [Stochastic Trajectory Prediction via Motion Indeterminacy Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13777/) (2022)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)
- [SocialVAE: Human Trajectory Prediction using Timewise Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08207/) (2022)
- [MG-GAN: A Multi-Generator Model Preventing Out-of-Distribution Samples in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09274/) (2021)
- [Non-Probability Sampling Network for Stochastic Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13471/) (2022)
- [Learning Pedestrian Group Representations for Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09953/) (2022)
- [EigenTrajectory: Low-Rank Descriptors for Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09306/) (2023)
- [Can Language Beat Numerical Regression? Language-Based Multimodal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18447/) (2024)
- [MoFlow: One-Step Flow Matching for Human Trajectory Forecasting via Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation based Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09950/) (2025)
- [A Cognitive-Based Trajectory Prediction Approach for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19251/) (2024)
- [Towards Better Human Robot Collaboration with Robust Plan Recognition and Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02199/) (2019)
- [Robot Trajectron: Trajectory Prediction-based Shared Control for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02499/) (2024)
- [Decentralized Multi-Agent System with Trust-Aware Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02410/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-Prediction with Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13354/) (2023)
- [Distributionally Robust Free Energy Principle for Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13223/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Consensus Subject to Communication and Privacy Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10642/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Trajectory prediction methods have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing complex motion patterns. However, existing methods rely on global state assumptions, suffer from insufficient belief inference under partial observability, and lack cognitive behavioral constraints in prediction. These limitations severely compromise both deployment feasibility and physical plausibility in real-world settings. In this work, we propose FEP-Diff, an agent-centric trajectory prediction framework grounded in the Free Energy Principle, aimed at achieving cognitively plausible predictions under realistic constraints. Specifically, a dual-branch spatiotemporal encoder extracts ego-motion dynamics and social interaction cues from local observations. Building upon this, a goal-conditioned belief learner infers multimodal latent belief distributions optimized via a free-energy objective, with a social consistency constraint on the local neighborhood graph to promote cognitive alignment among neighboring agents. Finally, a residual diffusion trajectory generator is conditioned on the learned belief representations with token-level proxy conditioning, producing precise and diverse future predictions. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that FEP-Diff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under restricted observability. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FEP-Diff-8876.