StarNet: Joint Action-Space Prediction with Star Graphs and Implicit Global-Frame Self-Attention

In this work, we present a novel multi-modal multi-agent trajectory prediction architecture, focusing on map and interaction modeling using graph representation. For the purposes of map modeling, we capture rich topological structure into vector-based star graphs, which enable an agent to directly attend to relevant regions along polylines that are used to represent the map. We denote this architecture StarNet, and integrate it into a single-agent prediction setting. As the main result, we extend this architecture to joint scene-level prediction, which produces multiple agents’ predictions simultaneously. The key idea in joint-StarNet is integrating the awareness of one agent in its own reference frame with how it is perceived from the points of view of other agents. We achieve this via masked self-attention. Both proposed architectures are built on top of the action-space prediction framework introduced in our previous work, which ensures kinematically feasible trajectory predictions. We evaluate the methods on the interaction-rich inD and INTERACTION datasets, with both StarNet and joint-StarNet achieving improvements over state of the art.