Generating Multi-Agent Trajectories using Programmatic Weak Supervision
Authors: Eric Zhan, Stephan Zheng, Yisong Yue, Long Sha, Patrick Lucey
Keywords: deep learning, generative models, imitation learning, hierarchical methods, data programming, weak supervision, spatiotemporal
TL;DR: We blend deep generative models with programmatic weak supervision to generate coordinated multi-agent trajectories of significantly higher quality than previous baselines.
Abstract: We study the problem of training sequential generative models for capturing coordinated multi-agent trajectory behavior, such as  offensive basketball gameplay.  When modeling such settings, it is often beneficial to design hierarchical models that can capture long-term coordination using intermediate variables.  Furthermore, these intermediate variables should capture interesting high-level behavioral semantics in an interpretable and manipulable way. We present a hierarchical framework that can effectively learn such sequential generative models.  Our approach is inspired by recent work on leveraging programmatically produced weak labels, which we extend to the spatiotemporal regime. In addition to synthetic settings, we show how to instantiate our framework to effectively model complex interactions between basketball players and generate realistic multi-agent trajectories of basketball gameplay over long time periods. We validate our approach using both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including a user study comparison conducted with professional sports analysts.