Collaborative Trajectory Prediction via Late Fusion

arXiv cs.RO / 4/28/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper targets uncertainty in autonomous trajectory forecasting caused by occlusions, limited sensing range, and perception errors by leveraging collaborative V2V information sharing.
  • Instead of fusing high-dimensional perception feature maps (which creates heavy communication overhead and relies on ideal bandwidth/synchronization), it proposes shifting collaboration to the prediction module.
  • The proposed late-fusion framework produces shared forecasts from collaborating vehicles treated as independent, asynchronous agents, and is model-agnostic.
  • Experiments on OPV2V, V2V4Real, and DeepAccident show that late fusion lowers miss rates and increases trajectory success rate (TSR0.5) versus individual (non-collaborative) forecasting.
  • On the real-world V2V4Real dataset, collaborative prediction improves success rate by 1.69% and 1.22% for both intelligent vehicles relative to individual forecasting.

Abstract

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding traffic agents is critical for safe autonomous navigation and collision avoidance. Despite all advances in the trajectory forecasting realm, the prediction models remains vulnerable to uncertainty caused by occlusions, limited sensing range, and perception errors. Collaborative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) approaches help reduce this uncertainty by sharing complementary information. Existing collaborative trajectory prediction methods typically fuse feature maps at the perception stage to construct a holistic scene view. Further this holistic representation is decoded into the future trajectories. Such design incurs substantial communication overhead due to the exchange of high-dimensional feature representations and often assumes idealized bandwidth and synchronization, limiting practical deployment. We address these limitations by shifting collaboration from perception to the prediction module and introducing a late-fusion framework for shared forecasts. The framework is model-agnostic and treats collaborating vehicles as independent asynchronous agents. We evaluate the approach on the OPV2V, V2V4Real, and DeepAccident datasets, comparing individual and collaborative forecasting. Across all datasets, late fusion consistently reduces miss rate and improves trajectory success rate (\mathrm{TSR}_{0.5}), defined as the fraction of ground-truth agents with final displacement error below 0.5 m. On the real-world V2V4Real dataset, collaborative prediction improves the success rate by 1.69\% and 1.22\% for both intelligent vehicles, respectively, compared with individual forecasting.