Dynamic Model Selection for Trajectory Prediction via Pairwise Ranking and Meta-Features

Abstract

Recent deep trajectory predictors (e.g., Jiang et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2022) have achieved strong average accuracy but remain unreliable in complex long-tail driving scenarios. These limitations reveal the weakness of the prevailing "one-model-fits-all" paradigm, particularly in safety-critical urban contexts where simpler physics-based models can occasionally outperform advanced networks (Kalman, 1960). To bridge this gap, we propose a dynamic multi-expert gating framework that adaptively selects the most reliable trajectory predictor among a physics-informed LSTM, a Transformer, and a fine-tuned GameFormer on a per-sample basis. Our method leverages internal model signals (meta-features) such as stability and uncertainty (Gal and Ghahramani, 2016), which we demonstrate to be substantially more informative than geometric scene descriptors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate trajectory expert selection as a pairwise-ranking problem over internal model signals (Burges et al., 2005), directly optimizing decision quality without requiring post-hoc calibration. Evaluated on the nuPlan-mini dataset (Caesar et al., 2021) with 1,287 samples, our LLM-enhanced tri-expert gate achieves a Final Displacement Error (FDE) of 2.567 m, representing a 9.5 percent reduction over GameFormer (2.835 m), and realizes 57.8 percent of the oracle performance bound. In open-loop simulations, after trajectory horizon alignment, the same configuration reduces FDE on left-turn scenarios by approximately 10 percent, demonstrating consistent improvements across both offline validation and open-loop evaluation. These results indicate that adaptive hybrid systems enhance trajectory reliability in safety-critical autonomous driving, providing a practical pathway beyond static single-model paradigms.