GUIDE-CoT: Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for Pedestrian Trajectory using Chain-of-Thought

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive results in reasoning tasks, their application to pedestrian trajectory prediction remains challenging due to two key limitations: insufficient use of visual information and the difficulty of predicting entire trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for pedestrian trajectory using Chain-of-Thought (GUIDE-CoT). Our approach integrates two innovative modules: (1) a goal-oriented visual prompt, which enhances goal prediction accuracy combining visual prompts with a pretrained visual encoder, and (2) a chain-of-thought (CoT) LLM for trajectory generation, which generates realistic trajectories toward the predicted goal. Moreover, our method introduces controllable trajectory generation, allowing for flexible and user-guided modifications to the predicted paths. Through extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY benchmark datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering both high accuracy and greater adaptability in pedestrian trajectory prediction. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ai-kmu/GUIDE-CoT.