Non-Parametric Spatiotemporal Trajectory Prediction via State-Conditioned Transition Sampling

arXiv:2608.14349 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-14

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: Accepted at the 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL '26), Riverside, CA, USA, November 3-6, 2026. 4 pages

DOI: 10.1145/3841645.3843393

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present a training-free method for multi-modal trajectory prediction that achieves comparable accuracy to a 57M-parameter transformer while requiring no GPU and zero learned parameters.

Terminology

Abstract

We present a training-free method for multi-modal trajectory prediction that achieves comparable accuracy to a 57M-parameter transformer while requiring no GPU and zero learned parameters. The method builds a transition table of historical state-to-next position pairs and retrieves neighbors using a product kernel over spatial proximity, bearing, speed, and temporal context. Two inference modes operate over this shared representation: diversity-penalized sampling produces trajectories covering distinct plausible routes, while beam search finds the highest-likelihood path. On the TrAISformer benchmark (Danish Maritime AIS), our method achieves competitive accuracy at full data availability and dramatically outperforms the transformer in data-scarce regimes---remaining stable down to 10% of training data where TrAISformer degrades catastrophically. This enables deployment in new geographic regions from an order of magnitude less historical data.

Related papers