ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Ruochen Li, Zhanxing Zhu, Tanqiu Qiao and Hubert P. H. Shum
Proceedings of the 2026 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

H5-Index: 232#

ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
# According to Google Scholar 2025

Abstract

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is critical for ensuring safety in autonomous driving, surveillance systems, and urban planning applications. While early approaches primarily focus on onehop pairwise relationships, recent studies attempt to capture high-order interactions by stacking multiple Graph Neural Network (GNN) layers. However, these approaches face a fundamental trade-off: insufficient layers may lead to underreaching problems that limit the model’s receptive field, while excessive depth can result in prohibitive computational costs. We argue that an effective model should be capable of adaptively modeling both explicit one-hop interactions and implicit high-order dependencies, rather than relying solely on architectural depth. To this end, we propose ViTE (Virtual graph Trajectory Expert router), a novel framework for pedestrian trajectory prediction. ViTE consists of two key modules: a Virtual Graph that introduces dynamic virtual nodes to model long-range and high-order interactions without deep GNN stacks, and an Expert Router that adaptively selects interaction experts based on social context using a Mixture-of-Experts design. This combination enables flexible and scalable reasoning across varying interaction patterns. Experiments on three benchmarks (ETH/UCY, NBA, and SDD) demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating both its effectiveness and practical efficiency.


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Plain Text

Ruochen Li, Zhanxing Zhu, Tanqiu Qiao and Hubert P. H. Shum, "ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction," in Proceedings of the 2026 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{li26vite,
 author={Li, Ruochen and Zhu, Zhanxing and Qiao, Tanqiu and Shum, Hubert P. H.},
 booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
 title={ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction},
 year={2026},
}

RIS

TY  - CONF
AU  - Li, Ruochen
AU  - Zhu, Zhanxing
AU  - Qiao, Tanqiu
AU  - Shum, Hubert P. H.
T2  - Proceedings of the 2026 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
TI  - ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
PY  - 2026
ER  - 


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