Event2Tracking: Reconstructing Multi-Agent Soccer Trajectories Using Long-Term Multimodal Context

Soccer is a rich testbed for studying multi-agent adversarial systems. In this work we focus on the task of reconstructing the noisy trajectories of soccer agents (players and the ball). Previous works that model the behaviours of agents in soccer are limited in two respects: (i) they only focus on short-term context windows (less than or equal to 10 seconds) which are not suitable for reconstructing trajectories impacted by long-term noise, and (ii) they exclusively rely on trajectory context, and do not leverage soccer's auxiliary data streams that can provide additional context. Our Event2Tracking model addresses these limitations. First, our architecture models soccer's long-term structure by processing long-term trajectories (60 seconds in duration). Secondly, our architecture is multimodal. Specifically, it fuses soccer tracking data with event data (which specifies the high-level semantic events that transpire in a game), providing rich context that cannot strictly be inferred from the raw trajectories. We evaluate our method empirically using a reconstruction loss metric. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our method substantially improves the accuracy of the ball's and players' reconstructed trajectories.