Higher-order Relational Reasoning for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Social relations have substantial impacts on the potential trajectories of each individual. Modeling these dynamics has been a central solution for more precise and accurate trajectory forecasting. However, previous works ignore the importance of `social depth', meaning the influences flowing from different degrees of social relations. In this work, we propose HighGraph, a graph-based relational reasoning method that captures the higher-order dynamics of social interactions. First, we construct a collision-aware relation graph based on the agents' observed trajectories. Upon this graph structure, we build our core module that aggregates the agent features from diverse social distances. As a result, the network is able to model more complex relations, thereby yielding more accurate and socially acceptable trajectories. Our HighGraph is a plug-and-play module that can be easily applied to any current trajectory predictors. Extensive experiments with ETH/UCY and SDD datasets demonstrate that our HighGraph noticeably improves the previous state-of-the-art baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively.