Adapting to Observation Length of Trajectory Prediction via Contrastive Learning

The ability to adapt to varying observation lengths is crucial for trajectory prediction tasks, particularly in scenarios with limited observation lengths or missing data. Existing approaches mainly focus on introducing novel architectures or additional structural components, which substantially increase model complexity and present challenges for integration into existing models. We argue that current network architectures are sufficiently sophisticated to handle the Observation Length Shift problem, with the key challenge lying in improving feature representation for trajectories with limited lengths. To tackle this issue, we introduce a general and effective contrastive learning approach, called Contrastive Learning for Length Shift (CLLS). By incorporating contrastive learning during the training phase, our method encourages the model to extract length-invariant features, thus mitigating the impact of observation length variations. Furthermore, to better accommodate length adaptation tasks, we introduce a lightweight RNN network that, combined with CLLS, achieves state-of-the-art performance in both general prediction and observation length shift tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods across multiple widely-used trajectory prediction datasets.