KEPT: Knowledge-enhanced prediction of trajectories from consecutive driving frames with vision-language models

Accurate short-horizon trajectory prediction is crucial for safe and reliable autonomous driving. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) often fail to accurately understand driving scenes and generate trustworthy trajectories. To address this challenge, this paper introduces KEPT, a knowledge-enhanced VLM framework that predicts ego trajectories directly from consecutive front-view driving frames. KEPT integrates a temporal frequency–spatial fusion (TFSF) video encoder, which is trained via self-supervised learning with hard-negative mining, with a k-means & HNSW retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Retrieved prior knowledge is added into chain-of-thought (CoT) prompts with explicit planning constraints, while a triple-stage fine-tuning paradigm aligns the VLM backbone to enhance spatial perception and trajectory prediction capabilities. Evaluated on nuScenes dataset, KEPT achieves the best open-loop performance compared with baseline methods. Ablation studies on fine-tuning stages, Top-K value of RAG, different retrieval strategies, vision encoders, and VLM backbones are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of KEPT. These results indicate that KEPT offers a promising, data-efficient way toward trustworthy trajectory prediction in autonomous driving.