Unified Trajectory and 3D Pose Forecasting for Multi-Agent Sports Analysis

Overview & Synopsis

Forecasting future human motion requires jointly reasoning about an agent's global trajectory and 3D body pose, which are tightly coupled, particularly in team sports where multiple interacting players introduce complex social dynamics. We exploit a socio-temporal encoder that fuses trajectory and pose at the input level and models them jointly through shared factorized attention. The model is further enhanced by a per-joint loss reweighting scheme that emphasizes dynamic joints and prevents degenerate solutions, and a frequency-domain trajectory smoothing term that improves trajectory prediction while indirectly benefiting pose forecasting. To ensure fair comparison with prior joint forecasting methods, we identify and correct evaluation biases arising from overlapping sequence construction, adopting instead a non-overlapping protocol and a deterministic, oracle-free strategy for multi-future prediction. Our approach improves over prior joint forecasting methods on both WorldPose and 3DPW, with the largest gains on pose accuracy, demonstrating that the proposed joint formulation generalizes beyond the densely interactive scenarios that motivate it.