# An Extensible Framework for Open Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13964/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [OPV2V: An Open Benchmark Dataset and Fusion Pipeline for Perception with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07644/) (2021)
- [V2VNet: Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Joint Perception and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07519/) (2020)
- [DAIR-V2X: A Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05575/) (2022)
- [Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12836/) (2022)
- [CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02202/) (2022)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [Learning Distilled Collaboration Graph for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00643/) (2021)
- [F-Cooper: Feature based Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicle Edge Computing System Using 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06459/) (2019)
- [When2com: Multi-Agent Perception via Communication Graph Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00176/) (2020)
- [V2X-Sim: Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception Dataset and Benchmark for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08449/) (2022)
- [V2V4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07601/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Sparse-to-Dense: Self-supervised Depth Completion from LiDAR and Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00275/) (2018)
- [Learning from All Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11934/) (2022)
- [Robust Collaborative 3D Object Detection in Presence of Pose Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07214/) (2022)
- [Who2com: Collaborative Perception via Learnable Handshake Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09575/) (2020)
- [DeepInteraction: 3D Object Detection via Modality Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11112/) (2022)
- [COOPERNAUT: End-to-End Driving with Cooperative Perception for Networked Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02222/) (2022)
- [Latency-Aware Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08560/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Information Filling with Codebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04966/) (2024)
- [STAMP: Scalable Task And Model-agnostic Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18616/) (2025)
- [V2XPnP: Vehicle-to-Everything Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Multi-Agent Perception and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01812/) (2024)
- [LangCoop: Collaborative Driving with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13406/) (2025)
- [V2X-Radar: A Multi-modal Dataset with 4D Radar for Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10962/) (2024)
- [Towards Collaborative Autonomous Driving: Simulation Platform and End-to-End System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09496/) (2024)
- [One is Plenty: A Polymorphic Feature Interpreter for Immutable Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16799/) (2024)
- [TraF-Align: Trajectory-aware Feature Alignment for Asynchronous Multi-agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19391/) (2025)
- [CP-Guard: Malicious Agent Detection and Defense in Collaborative Bird's Eye View Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12000/) (2024)
- [CoLMDriver: LLM-based Negotiation Benefits Cooperative Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08683/) (2025)
- [CoCMT: Communication-Efficient Cross-Modal Transformer for Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13504/) (2025)
- [V2X-DGW: Domain Generalization for Multi-agent Perception under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11371/) (2024)
- [RoCo:Robust Collaborative Perception By Iterative Object Matching and Pose Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00257/) (2024)
- [Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02408/) (2024)
- [CooPre: Cooperative Pretraining for V2X Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11241/) (2024)
- [AirV2X: Unified Air-Ground Vehicle-to-Everything Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19283/) (2025)
- [QuantV2X: A Fully Quantized Multi-Agent System for Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03704/) (2025)
- [Adver-City: Open-Source Multi-Modal Dataset for Collaborative Perception Under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06380/) (2024)
- [TurboTrain: Towards Efficient and Balanced Multi-Task Learning for Multi-Agent Perception and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04682/) (2025)
- [Pragmatic Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception via Generative Communication Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19618/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Perception Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12696/) (2025)
- [IFTR: An Instance-Level Fusion Transformer for Visual Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09857/) (2024)
- [RCDN: Towards Robust Camera-Insensitivity Collaborative Perception via Dynamic Feature-based 3D Neural Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16868/) (2024)
- [Is Discretization Fusion All You Need for Collaborative Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13946/) (2025)
- [Systematic Literature Review on Vehicular Collaborative Perception -- A Computer Vision Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04631/) (2025)
- [Automated Vehicles Should be Connected with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01059/) (2025)
- [NegoCollab: A Common Representation Negotiation Approach for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27647/) (2025)
- [MDrive: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Cooperative Driving for End-to-End Multi-agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10904/) (2026)
- [RS-DFM: A Remote Sensing Distributed Foundation Model for Diverse Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07032/) (2024)
- [Learning 3D Perception from Others' Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02646/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collaborative perception aims to mitigate the limitations of single-agent perception, such as occlusions, by facilitating data exchange among multiple agents. However, most current works consider a homogeneous scenario where all agents use identity sensors and perception models. In reality, heterogeneous agent types may continually emerge and inevitably face a domain gap when collaborating with existing agents. In this paper, we introduce a new open heterogeneous problem: how to accommodate continually emerging new heterogeneous agent types into collaborative perception, while ensuring high perception performance and low integration cost? To address this problem, we propose HEterogeneous ALliance (HEAL), a novel extensible collaborative perception framework. HEAL first establishes a unified feature space with initial agents via a novel multi-scale foreground-aware Pyramid Fusion network. When heterogeneous new agents emerge with previously unseen modalities or models, we align them to the established unified space with an innovative backward alignment. This step only involves individual training on the new agent type, thus presenting extremely low training costs and high extensibility. To enrich agents' data heterogeneity, we bring OPV2V-H, a new large-scale dataset with more diverse sensor types. Extensive experiments on OPV2V-H and DAIR-V2X datasets show that HEAL surpasses SOTA methods in performance while reducing the training parameters by 91.5% when integrating 3 new agent types. We further implement a comprehensive codebase at: https://github.com/yifanlu0227/HEAL
