Towards Generalizable Trajectory Prediction Using Dual-Level Representation Learning And Adaptive Prompting

Existing vehicle trajectory prediction models struggle with generalizability, prediction uncertainties, and handling complex interactions. It is often due to limitations like complex architectures customized for a specific dataset and inefficient multimodal handling. We propose Perceiver with Register queries (PerReg+), a novel trajectory prediction framework that introduces: (1) Dual-Level Representation Learning via Self-Distillation (SD) and Masked Reconstruction (MR), capturing global context and fine-grained details. Additionally, our approach of reconstructing segmentlevel trajectories and lane segments from masked inputs with query drop, enables effective use of contextual information and improves generalization; (2) Enhanced Multimodality using register-based queries and pretraining, eliminating the need for clustering and suppression; and (3) Adaptive Prompt Tuning during fine-tuning, freezing the main architecture and optimizing a small number of prompts for efficient adaptation. PerReg+ sets a new state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes [1], Argoverse 2 [2], and Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) [3]. Remarkable, our pretrained model reduces the error by 6.8% on smaller datasets, and multi-dataset training enhances generalization. In cross-domain tests, PerReg+ reduces B-FDE by 11.8% compared to its non-pretrained variant.

DRIVINGVQA: Analyzing Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of Vision Language Models in Real-World Scenarios with Driving Theory Tests

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) augment language models with visual understanding, enabling multimodal reasoning. However, due to the modality gap between textual and visual data, they often face significant challenges, such as over-reliance on text priors, hallucinations, and limited capacity for complex visual reasoning. Existing benchmarks to evaluate visual reasoning in LVLMs often rely on schematic or synthetic images and on imprecise machine-generated explanations. To bridge the modality gap, we present DrivingVQA, a new benchmark derived from driving theory tests to evaluate visual chain-of-thought reasoning in complex real-world scenarios. It offers 3,931 expert-crafted multiple-choice problems and interleaved explanations grounded with entities relevant to the reasoning process. We leverage this dataset to perform an extensive study of LVLMs' ability to reason about complex visual scenarios. Our experiments reveal that open-source and proprietary LVLMs struggle with visual chain-of-thought reasoning under zero-shot settings. We investigate training strategies that leverage relevant entities to improve visual reasoning. Notably, we observe a performance boost of up to 7\% when reasoning over image tokens of cropped regions tied to these entities.

Multi-Source Urban Traffic Flow Forecasting with Drone and Loop Detector Data

Traffic forecasting is a fundamental task in transportation research, however the scope of current research has mainly focused on a single data modality of loop detectors. Recently, the advances in Artificial Intelligence and drone technologies have made possible novel solutions for efficient, accurate and flexible aerial observations of urban traffic. As a promising traffic monitoring approach, drone-captured data can create an accurate multi-sensor mobility observatory for large-scale urban networks, when combined with existing infrastructure. Therefore, this paper investigates the problem of multi-source traffic speed prediction, simultaneously using drone and loop detector data. A simple yet effective graph-based model HiMSNet is proposed to integrate multiple data modalities and learn spatio-temporal correlations. Detailed analysis shows that predicting accurate segment-level speed is more challenging than the regional speed, especially under high-demand scenarios with heavier congestions and varying traffic dynamics. Utilizing both drone and loop detector data, the prediction accuracy can be improved compared to single-modality cases, when the sensors have lower coverages and are subject to noise. Our simulation study based on vehicle trajectories in a real urban road network has highlighted the added value of integrating drones in traffic forecasting and monitoring.

MotionMap: Representing Multimodality in Human Pose Forecasting

Human pose forecasting is inherently multimodal since multiple futures exist for an observed pose sequence. However, evaluating multimodality is challenging since the task is ill-posed. Therefore, we first propose an alternative paradigm to make the task well-posed. Next, while state-of-the-art methods predict multimodality, this requires oversampling a large volume of predictions. This raises key questions: (1) Can we capture multimodality by efficiently sampling a smaller number of predictions? (2) Subsequently, which of the predicted futures is more likely for an observed pose sequence? We address these questions with MotionMap, a simple yet effective heatmap based representation for multimodality. We extend heatmaps to represent a spatial distribution over the space of all possible motions, where different local maxima correspond to different forecasts for a given observation. MotionMap can capture a variable number of modes per observation and provide confidence measures for different modes. Further, MotionMap allows us to introduce the notion of uncertainty and controllability over the forecasted pose sequence. Finally, MotionMap captures rare modes that are non-trivial to evaluate yet critical for safety. We support our claims through multiple qualitative and quantitative experiments using popular 3D human pose datasets: Human3.6M and AMASS, highlighting the strengths and limitations of our proposed method. Project Page: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/vita/research/prediction/motionmap/

GEM: A Generalizable Ego-Vision Multimodal World Model for Fine-Grained Ego-Motion, Object Dynamics, and Scene Composition Control

We present GEM, a Generalizable Ego-vision Multimodal world model that predicts future frames using a reference frame, sparse features, human poses, and ego-trajectories. Hence, our model has precise control over object dynamics, ego-agent motion and human poses. GEM generates paired RGB and depth outputs for richer spatial understanding. We introduce autoregressive noise schedules to enable stable long-horizon generations. Our dataset is comprised of 4000+ hours of multimodal data across domains like autonomous driving, egocentric human activities, and drone flights. Pseudo-labels are used to get depth maps, ego-trajectories, and human poses. We use a comprehensive evaluation framework, including a new Control of Object Manipulation (COM) metric, to assess controllability. Experiments show GEM excels at generating diverse, controllable scenarios and temporal consistency over long generations. Code, models, and datasets are fully open-sourced.

TAROT: Targeted Data Selection via Optimal Transport

We propose TAROT, a targeted data selection framework grounded in optimal transport theory. Previous targeted data selection methods primarily rely on influence-based greedy heuristics to enhance domain-specific performance. While effective on limited, unimodal data (i.e., data following a single pattern), these methods struggle as target data complexity increases. Specifically, in multimodal distributions, these heuristics fail to account for multiple inherent patterns, leading to suboptimal data selection. This work identifies two primary factors contributing to this limitation: (i) the disproportionate impact of dominant feature components in high-dimensional influence estimation, and (ii) the restrictive linear additive assumptions inherent in greedy selection strategies. To address these challenges, TAROT incorporates whitened feature distance to mitigate dominant feature bias, providing a more reliable measure of data influence. Building on this, TAROT uses whitened feature distance to quantify and minimize the optimal transport distance between the selected data and target domains. Notably, this minimization also facilitates the estimation of optimal selection ratios. We evaluate TAROT across multiple tasks, including semantic segmentation, motion prediction, and instruction tuning. Results consistently show that TAROT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its versatility across various deep learning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/TAROT.

A Multi-Loss Strategy for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction: Combining Off-Road, Diversity, and Directional Consistency Losses

Trajectory prediction is essential for the safety and efficiency of planning in autonomous vehicles. However, current models often fail to fully capture complex traffic rules and the complete range of potential vehicle movements. Addressing these limitations, this study introduces three novel loss functions: Offroad Loss, Direction Consistency Error, and Diversity Loss. These functions are designed to keep predicted paths within driving area boundaries, aligned with traffic directions, and cover a wider variety of plausible driving scenarios. As all prediction modes should adhere to road rules and conditions, this work overcomes the shortcomings of traditional "winner takes all" training methods by applying the loss functions to all prediction modes. These loss functions not only improve model training but can also serve as metrics for evaluating the realism and diversity of trajectory predictions. Extensive validation on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets with leading baseline models demonstrates that our approach not only maintains accuracy but significantly improves safety and robustness, reducing offroad errors on average by 47% on original and by 37% on attacked scenes. This work sets a new benchmark for trajectory prediction in autonomous driving, offering substantial improvements in navigating complex environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/stay-on-track .

Helvipad: A Real-World Dataset for Omnidirectional Stereo Depth Estimation

Despite considerable progress in stereo depth estimation, omnidirectional imaging remains underexplored, mainly due to the lack of appropriate data. We introduce Helvipad, a real-world dataset for omnidirectional stereo depth estimation, consisting of 40K frames from video sequences across diverse environments, including crowded indoor and outdoor scenes with diverse lighting conditions. Collected using two 360{\deg} cameras in a top-bottom setup and a LiDAR sensor, the dataset includes accurate depth and disparity labels by projecting 3D point clouds onto equirectangular images. Additionally, we provide an augmented training set with a significantly increased label density by using depth completion. We benchmark leading stereo depth estimation models for both standard and omnidirectional images. The results show that while recent stereo methods perform decently, a significant challenge persists in accurately estimating depth in omnidirectional imaging. To address this, we introduce necessary adaptations to stereo models, achieving improved performance.

Multi-Transmotion: Pre-trained Model for Human Motion Prediction

The ability of intelligent systems to predict human behaviors is crucial, particularly in fields such as autonomous vehicle navigation and social robotics. However, the complexity of human motion have prevented the development of a standardized dataset for human motion prediction, thereby hindering the establishment of pre-trained models. In this paper, we address these limitations by integrating multiple datasets, encompassing both trajectory and 3D pose keypoints, to propose a pre-trained model for human motion prediction. We merge seven distinct datasets across varying modalities and standardize their formats. To facilitate multimodal pre-training, we introduce Multi-Transmotion, an innovative transformer-based model designed for cross-modality pre-training. Additionally, we present a novel masking strategy to capture rich representations. Our methodology demonstrates competitive performance across various datasets on several downstream tasks, including trajectory prediction in the NBA and JTA datasets, as well as pose prediction in the AMASS and 3DPW datasets. The code is publicly available: https://github.com/vita-epfl/multi-transmotion

Strada-LLM: Graph LLM for traffic prediction

Traffic prediction is a vital component of intelligent transportation systems. By reasoning about traffic patterns in both the spatial and temporal dimensions, accurate and interpretable predictions can be provided. A considerable challenge in traffic prediction lies in handling the diverse data distributions caused by vastly different traffic conditions occurring at different locations. LLMs have been a dominant solution due to their remarkable capacity to adapt to new datasets with very few labeled data samples, i.e., few-shot adaptability. However, existing forecasting techniques mainly focus on extracting local graph information and forming a text-like prompt, leaving LLM- based traffic prediction an open problem. This work presents a probabilistic LLM for traffic forecasting with three highlights. We propose a graph-aware LLM for traffic prediction that considers proximal traffic information. Specifically, by considering the traffic of neighboring nodes as covariates, our model outperforms the corresponding time-series LLM. Furthermore, we adopt a lightweight approach for efficient domain adaptation when facing new data distributions in few-shot fashion. The comparative experiment demonstrates the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and the traditional GNN- based supervised approaches. Furthermore, Strada-LLM can be easily adapted to different LLM backbones without a noticeable performance drop.