DESTINE: Dynamic Goal Queries with Temporal Transductive Alignment for Trajectory Prediction

Predicting temporally consistent road users' trajectories in a multi-agent setting is a challenging task due to the unknown characteristics of agents and their varying intentions. Besides using semantic map information and modeling interactions, it is important to build an effective mechanism capable of reasoning about behaviors at different levels of granularity. To this end, we propose Dynamic goal quErieS with temporal Transductive alIgNmEnt (DESTINE) method. Unlike prior approaches, our approach 1) dynamically predicts agents' goals irrespective of particular road structures, such as lanes, allowing the method to produce a more accurate estimation of destinations; 2) achieves map-compliant predictions by generating future trajectories in a coarse-to-fine fashion, where the coarser predictions at a lower frame rate serve as intermediate goals; and 3) uses an attention module designed to temporally align predicted trajectories via a masked attention operation. Using the common Argoverse benchmark dataset, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various metrics, and further investigate the contributions of proposed modules via comprehensive ablation studies.