A Counterfactual Reasoning-based Trajectory Prediction Model for Multiple Agents

Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial in autonomous driving to ensure safe and efficient navigation, yet effectively modeling complex interactions among multiple agents remains a significant challenge. Many existing methods still suffer from over-reliance on HD maps, high computational cost, and a lack of interpretability in interaction reasoning. In response, the proposed model innovatively incorporates counterfactual reasoning into social interaction modeling to tackle the challenges of interaction-aware multi-agent trajectory prediction, prioritizing both accuracy and efficiency. In light of the spatiotemporal interaction mechanism and the inherent human cognition governing agents’ motion, the approach simultaneously generates multi-modal trajectories for all agents in a scenario, providing a novel perspective for modeling social interactions through causal reasoning. The results demonstrate that our map-free, lightweight trajectory prediction model rivals the performance of state-of-the-art methods and shows notable improvements over various baselines on publicly available real-world datasets.