Unified Pedestrian Path Prediction Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Pedestrian path prediction is crucial for enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems. Previous studies explored different learning-task formulations for pedestrian path prediction and compared these formulations using shallow neural networks, but did not extend this analysis to more complex deep-learning models. This paper adapts the Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Network (STGAT) to a unified pedestrian path prediction framework and introduces state and action definitions specific to STGAT. The resulting formulations support deterministic and stochastic policies, one-time and sequential decision-making, and reinforcement-learning algorithms including REINFORCE and proximal policy optimization. The proposed learning-task formulations improve prediction performance across the selected benchmark datasets compared with the standard supervised-learning formulation. These results demonstrate that reformulating the decision process and training objective can improve an advanced pedestrian trajectory prediction architecture and may provide a path toward improving other graph-based prediction models.