# GEAR: From Dynamic Encoding to Dynamic Activation in Social Trajectory Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13778/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [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)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02025/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06113/) (2019)
- [From Goals, Waypoints & Paths To Long Term Human Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01526/) (2020)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [Remember Intentions: Retrospective-Memory-based Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11474/) (2022)
- [Human Trajectory Prediction via Neural Social Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10435/) (2022)
- [MUSE-VAE: Multi-Scale VAE for Environment-Aware Long Term Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07189/) (2022)
- [View Vertically: A Hierarchical Network for Trajectory Prediction via Fourier Spectrums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07288/) (2021)
- [Human Trajectory Prediction via Counterfactual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14202/) (2021)
- [Fast Inference and Update of Probabilistic Density Estimation on Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08824/) (2023)
- [SocialCircle: Learning the Angle-based Social Interaction Representation for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05370/) (2023)
- [SMEMO: Social Memory for Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12446/) (2022)
- [LG-Traj: LLM Guided Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08032/) (2024)
- [DeMo: Decoupling Motion Forecasting into Directional Intentions and Dynamic States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05982/) (2024)
- [Progressive Pretext Task Learning for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11588/) (2024)
- [Another Vertical View: A Hierarchical Network for Heterogeneous Trajectory Prediction via Spectrums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05106/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction via Distributional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08367/) (2023)
- [SocialCircle+: Learning the Angle-based Conditioned Interaction Representation for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14984/) (2024)
- [Resonance: Learning to Predict Social-Aware Pedestrian Trajectories as Co-Vibrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02447/) (2024)
- [The Stanford Drone Dataset is More Complex than We Think: An Analysis of Key Characteristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11743/) (2022)
- [Intention-Aware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07146/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human trajectory prediction requires modeling both individual motion patterns and social interactions among agents. Existing methods have made substantial progress by using attention mechanisms, graph structures, and temporal encoders to capture dynamic social context. However, most of them primarily focus on how social information is encoded, while paying less explicit attention to how the encoded social context should take effect during future trajectory generation. In this paper, we argue that dynamic social encoding does not necessarily imply dynamic social activation. The same interaction context may require different activation strengths across future horizons and scene densities: social cues should be strengthened when interaction evidence is strong, but suppressed when they are weak or noisy. To address this issue, we propose GEAR, a generation-aware bias activation model for human trajectory prediction. Built upon a bias-decomposed trajectory generation formulation, GEAR dynamically activates the individual-motion and social-resonance bias terms at each future step before final trajectory composition. This allows the model to explicitly control when and how strongly individual and social bias components participate in generation. Experiments on ETH-UCY, SDD, and NBA show that GEAR consistently improves the resonance-based baseline and achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance. Further analyses of activation patterns and density-grouped errors validate the importance of calibrating encoded social context during trajectory generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/11isnotavailable/GEAR.git.