# Unified Pedestrian Path Prediction Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15929 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15929/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for autonomous driving and traffic, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for autonomous driving and traffic](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-autonomous-driving-and-traffic/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04689/) (2017)
- [Peeking into the Future: Predicting Future Person Activities and Locations in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03748/) (2019)
- [Egocentric Vision-based Future Vehicle Localization for Intelligent Driving Assistance Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07408/) (2018)
- [Bio-LSTM: A Biomechanically Inspired Recurrent Neural Network for 3D Pedestrian Pose and Gait Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03705/) (2018)
- [Understanding Human Behaviors in Crowds by Imitating the Decision-Making Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08391/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.