Papers › baller2vec++: A Look-Ahead Multi-Entity Transformer For Modeling Coordinated Agents

baller2vec++: A Look-Ahead Multi-Entity Transformer For Modeling Coordinated Agents

24 Apr 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2104.11980archive 2025-07-28

Michael A. Alcorn, Anh Nguyen

In many multi-agent spatiotemporal systems, agents operate under the influence of shared, unobserved variables (e.g., the play a team is executing in a game of basketball). As a result, the trajectories of the agents are often statistically dependent at any given time step; however, almost universally, multi-agent models implicitly assume the agents' trajectories are statistically independent at each time step. In this paper, we introduce baller2vec++, a multi-entity Transformer that can effectively model coordinated agents. Specifically, baller2vec++ applies a specially designed self-attention mask to a mixture of location and "look-ahead" trajectory sequences to learn the distributions of statistically dependent agent trajectories. We show that, unlike baller2vec (baller2vec++'s predecessor), baller2vec++ can learn to emulate the behavior of perfectly coordinated agents in a simulated toy dataset. Additionally, when modeling the trajectories of professional basketball players, baller2vec++ outperforms baller2vec by a wide margin.

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fill_in_periods airalcorn2/baller2vecplusplus/generate_game_numpy_arrays.py official repository ran · violated contract MIT (permissive) · 6451a93a94433b21 · report
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Tasks

Trajectory Modeling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Trajectory Modeling NBA SportVU baller2vec++ 1x1 NLL 0.472 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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