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Main Author: Teoh, Wei Zhen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18248
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author Teoh, Wei Zhen
author_facet Teoh, Wei Zhen
contents Jointly forecasting trajectories of multiple interacting agents is a core challenge in sports analytics and other domains involving complex group dynamics. Accurate prediction enables realistic simulation and strategic understanding of gameplay evolution. Most existing models are evaluated solely on per-agent accuracy metrics (minADE, minFDE), which assess each agent independently on its best-of-k prediction. However these metrics overlook whether the model learns which predicted trajectories can jointly form a plausible multi-agent future. Many state-of-the-art models are designed and optimized primarily based on these metrics. As a result, they may underperform on joint predictions and also fail to generate coherent, interpretable multi-agent scenarios in team sports. We propose CausalTraj, a temporally causal, likelihood-based model that is built to generate jointly probable multi-agent trajectory forecasts. To better assess collective modeling capability, we emphasize joint metrics (minJADE, minJFDE) that measure joint accuracy across agents within the best generated scenario sample. Evaluated on the NBA SportVU, Basketball-U, and Football-U datasets, CausalTraj achieves competitive per-agent accuracy and the best recorded results on joint metrics, while yielding qualitatively coherent and realistic gameplay evolutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coherent Multi-Agent Trajectory Forecasting in Team Sports with CausalTraj
Teoh, Wei Zhen
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Jointly forecasting trajectories of multiple interacting agents is a core challenge in sports analytics and other domains involving complex group dynamics. Accurate prediction enables realistic simulation and strategic understanding of gameplay evolution. Most existing models are evaluated solely on per-agent accuracy metrics (minADE, minFDE), which assess each agent independently on its best-of-k prediction. However these metrics overlook whether the model learns which predicted trajectories can jointly form a plausible multi-agent future. Many state-of-the-art models are designed and optimized primarily based on these metrics. As a result, they may underperform on joint predictions and also fail to generate coherent, interpretable multi-agent scenarios in team sports. We propose CausalTraj, a temporally causal, likelihood-based model that is built to generate jointly probable multi-agent trajectory forecasts. To better assess collective modeling capability, we emphasize joint metrics (minJADE, minJFDE) that measure joint accuracy across agents within the best generated scenario sample. Evaluated on the NBA SportVU, Basketball-U, and Football-U datasets, CausalTraj achieves competitive per-agent accuracy and the best recorded results on joint metrics, while yielding qualitatively coherent and realistic gameplay evolutions.
title Coherent Multi-Agent Trajectory Forecasting in Team Sports with CausalTraj
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18248