R-Pred: Two-Stage Motion Prediction Via Tube-Query Attention-Based Trajectory Refinement

Predicting the future motion of dynamic agents is of paramount importance to ensure safety or assess risks in motion planning for autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a two-stage motion prediction method, referred to as R-Pred, that effectively utilizes both the scene and interaction context using a cascade of the initial trajectory proposal network and the trajectory refinement network. The initial trajectory proposal network produces M trajectory proposals corresponding to M modes of a future trajectory distribution. The trajectory refinement network enhances each of M proposals using 1) the tube-query scene attention (TQSA) and 2) the proposal-level interaction attention (PIA). TQSA uses tube-queries to aggregate the local scene context features pooled from proximity around the trajectory proposals of interest. PIA further enhances the trajectory proposals by modeling inter-agent interactions using a group of trajectory proposals selected based on their distances from neighboring agents. Our experiments conducted on the Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that the proposed refinement network provides significant performance improvements compared to the single-stage baseline and that R-Pred achieves state-of-the-art performance in some categories of the benchmark.