PatchTraj: Dynamic Patch Representation Learning for Time-Frequency Trajectory Prediction

Abstract: Pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous driving and robotics. While existing point-based and grid-based methods expose two key limitations: insufficiently modeling human motion dynamics, as they fail to balance local motion details with long-range spatiotemporal dependencies, and the time representation lacks interaction with the frequency domain in modeling trajectory sequences. To address these challenges, we propose PatchTraj, a dynamic patch-based trajectory prediction framework that unifies time-domain and frequency-domain representations. Specifically, we decompose the trajectory into raw time sequences and frequency components, employing dynamic patch partitioning for multi-scale trajectory segmentation to capture hierarchical motion patterns. Each patch is processed by an adaptive embedding layer with scale-aware feature extraction, followed by hierarchical feature aggregation to model both fine-grained and long-range dependencies. The outputs of two branches interact via cross-modal attention, enabling complementary fusion of temporal and spectral cues. Finally, a Transformer encoder-decoder integrates both modalities to autoregressively predict future trajectories. Extensive experiments on ETH-UCY, SDD, NBA, and JRDB datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency.