# Structural Information Guided Multimodal Pre-training for Vehicle-centric Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09812/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [K-BERT: Enabling Language Representation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07606/) (2019)
- [MAGE: MAsked Generative Encoder to Unify Representation Learning and Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09117/) (2022)
- [Wav2CLIP: Learning Robust Audio Representations From CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11499/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10035/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [CM3AE: A Unified RGB Frame and Event-Voxel/-Frame Pre-training Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12576/) (2025)
- [VFM-Det: Towards High-Performance Vehicle Detection via Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13031/) (2024)
- [Vehicle-centric Perception via Multimodal Structured Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19934/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07950/) (2025)
- [Segment Any Vehicle: Semantic and Visual Context Driven SAM and A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04260/) (2025)
- [T2I-VeRW: Part-level Fine-grained Perception for Text-to-Image Vehicle Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06012/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding vehicles in images is important for various applications such as intelligent transportation and self-driving system. Existing vehicle-centric works typically pre-train models on large-scale classification datasets and then fine-tune them for specific downstream tasks. However, they neglect the specific characteristics of vehicle perception in different tasks and might thus lead to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel vehicle-centric pre-training framework called VehicleMAE, which incorporates the structural information including the spatial structure from vehicle profile information and the semantic structure from informative high-level natural language descriptions for effective masked vehicle appearance reconstruction. To be specific, we explicitly extract the sketch lines of vehicles as a form of the spatial structure to guide vehicle reconstruction. The more comprehensive knowledge distilled from the CLIP big model based on the similarity between the paired/unpaired vehicle image-text sample is further taken into consideration to help achieve a better understanding of vehicles. A large-scale dataset is built to pre-train our model, termed Autobot1M, which contains about 1M vehicle images and 12693 text information. Extensive experiments on four vehicle-based downstream tasks fully validated the effectiveness of our VehicleMAE. The source code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/Event-AHU/VehicleMAE.