Exploitation of Hidden Context in Dynamic Movement Forecasting: A Neural Network Journey from Recurrent to Graph Neural Networks and General Purpose Transformers

2026-05-14

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of modeling dynamic motion prediction in fast-paced sports scenarios such as the NBA, where nonlinear interactions, abrupt behavioral shifts, and contextual dependencies complicate accurate forecasting. The authors systematically evaluate several deep learning architectures—including LSTM, Graph Attention Networks (GAT), Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks (TCNN), and Transformers—and propose a hybrid LSTM model that effectively integrates temporal dependencies with implicit contextual information through enriched contextual features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a state-of-the-art minimum final displacement error of 1.51 meters within a 2-second prediction horizon, significantly outperforming competing approaches. Furthermore, the model exhibits superior data efficiency and lower training costs, highlighting important performance trade-offs across multiple evaluation dimensions.

Abstract

Forecasting within signal processing pipelines is crucial for mitigating delays, particularly in predicting the dynamic movements of objects such as NBA players. This task poses significant challenges due to the inherently interactive and unpredictable nature of sports, where abrupt changes in velocity and direction are prevalent. Traditional approaches, including (S)ARIMA(X), Kalman filters (KF), and Particle filters (PF), often struggle to model the non-linear dynamics present in such scenarios. Machine learning (ML) methods, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, graph neural networks (GNNs), and Transformers, offer greater flexibility and accuracy but frequently fail to explicitly capture the interplay between temporal dependencies and contextual interactions, which are critical in chaotic sports environments. In this paper, we evaluate these models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Experimental results reveal key performance trade-offs across input history length, generalizability, and the ability to incorporate contextual information. ML-based methods demonstrated substantial improvements over linear models across forecast horizons of up to 2s. Among the tested architectures, our hybrid LSTM augmented with contextual information achieved the lowest final displacement error (FDE) of 1.51m, outperforming temporal convolutional neural network (TCNN), graph attention network (GAT), and Transformers, while also requiring less data and training time compared to GAT and Transformers. Our findings indicate that no single architecture excels across all metrics, emphasizing the need for task-specific considerations in trajectory prediction for fast-paced, dynamic environments such as NBA gameplay.

Problem

• dynamic movement forecasting
• contextual interactions
• trajectory prediction
• sports analytics
• temporal dependencies

Innovation

• context-aware forecasting
• hybrid LSTM
• trajectory prediction
• graph neural networks
• Transformers