[Submitted on 26 Jan 2026 (v1), last revised 21 Jul 2026 (this version, v4)]

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Accurate long-horizon vessel trajectory prediction remains challenging due to compounded uncertainty from complex navigation behaviors and environmental factors. Existing methods often struggle to maintain global directional consistency, leading to drifting or implausible trajectories when extrapolated over long time horizons. To address this issue, we propose a semantic-key-point-conditioned trajectory modeling framework, in which future trajectories are predicted by conditioning on a high-level Next Key Point (NKP) that captures navigational intent. This formulation decomposes long-horizon prediction into global semantic decision-making and local motion modeling, effectively restricting the support of future trajectories to semantically feasible subsets. To efficiently estimate the NKP prior from historical observations, we adopt a pretrain-finetune strategy. Extensive experiments on real-world AIS data demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly for long travel durations, directional accuracy, and fine-grained trajectory prediction.

Submission history

From: Linyong Gan [view email]
[v1] Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:42:31 UTC (1,607 KB)
[v2] Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:03:47 UTC (5,345 KB)
[v3] Fri, 29 May 2026 08:17:45 UTC (5,346 KB)
[v4] Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:30:59 UTC (4,703 KB)