PTP: Parallelized Tracking and Prediction with Graph Neural Networks and Diversity Sampling

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and trajectory forecasting are two critical components in modern 3D perception systems that require accurate modeling of multi-agent interaction. We hypothesize that it is beneficial to unify both tasks under one framework in order to learn a shared feature representation of agent interaction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we propose a unified solution for 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting which also incorporates two additional novel computational units. First, we propose a feature interaction technique by introducing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture the way in which multiple agents interact with one another. The GNN is able to model complex hierarchical interactions, improve the discriminative feature learning for MOT association, and provide socially-aware context for trajectory forecasting. Second, we use a diversity sampling function to improve the quality and diversity of our forecasted trajectories. The learned sampling function is trained to efficiently extract a variety of outcomes from a generative trajectory distribution and helps avoid the problem of generating many duplicate trajectory samples. We evaluate on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, showing that our unified method with feature interaction and diversity sampling achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting. Our code will be made available at this https URL.