FlatFusion: Delving into Details of Sparse Transformer-based Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Autonomous Driving
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Abstract (arXiv)
The integration of data from diverse sensor modalities (e.g., camera and LiDAR) constitutes a prevalent methodology within the ambit of autonomous driving scenarios. Recent advancements in efficient point cloud transformers have underscored the efficacy of integrating information in sparse formats. When it comes to fusion, since image patches are dense in pixel space with ambiguous depth, it necessitates additional design considerations for effective fusion. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive exploration of design choices for Transformer-based sparse cameraLiDAR fusion. This investigation encompasses strategies for image-to-3D and LiDAR-to-2D mapping, attention neighbor grouping, single modal tokenizer, and micro-structure of Transformer. By amalgamating the most effective principles uncovered through our investigation, we introduce FlatFusion, a carefully designed framework for sparse camera-LiDAR fusion. Notably, FlatFusion significantly outperforms state-of-the-art sparse Transformer-based methods, including UniTR, CMT, and SparseFusion, achieving 73.7 NDS on the nuScenes validation set with 10.1 FPS with PyTorch.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 70 of its 93 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2024.
Builds on
70 of 93 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 7; 2026: 1.
9 papers.
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- 2024Bench2Drive-R: Turning Real World Data into Reactive Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Benchmark by Generative Modelcited by 14
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- 2025DriveVGGT: Calibration-Constrained Visual Geometry Transformers for Multi-Camera Autonomous Drivingcited by 4
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- 2026Variational Inference for Bird's Eye View Segmentation in Autonomous Driving16 Jul 2026
- 2025Spatial Retrieval Augmented Autonomous Driving7 Dec 2025
- 2025DriveVGGT: Calibration-Constrained Visual Geometry Transformers for Multi-Camera Autonomous Driving27 Nov 2025
- 2025MambaFusion: Height-Fidelity Dense Global Fusion for Multi-modal 3D Object Detection6 Jul 2025
- 2025ReSim: Reliable World Simulation for Autonomous Driving11 Jun 2025
- 2025Raw2Drive: Reinforcement Learning with Aligned World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving (in CARLA v2)22 May 2025
- 2025DriveMoE: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in End-to-End Autonomous Driving22 May 2025
- 2025A Novel Vision Transformer for Camera-LiDAR Fusion based Traffic Object Segmentation6 Jan 2025
- 2024Bench2Drive-R: Turning Real World Data into Reactive Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Benchmark by Generative Model11 Dec 2024