FloMo: Tractable Motion Prediction with Normalizing Flows

abstract

The future motion of traffic participants is inherently uncertain. To plan safely, therefore, an autonomous agent must take into account multiple possible outcomes and prioritize them. Recently, this problem has been addressed with generative neural networks. However, most generative models either do not learn the true underlying trajectory distribution reliably, or do not allow likelihoods to be associated with predictions. In our work, we model motion prediction directly as a density estimation problem with a normalizing flow between a noise sample and the future motion distribution. Our model, named FloMo, allows likelihoods to be computed in a single network pass and can be trained directly with maximum likelihood estimation. Furthermore, we propose a method to stabilize training flows on trajectory datasets and a new data augmentation transformation that improves the performance and generalization of our model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular prediction datasets, with a significant gap to most competing models.