# Progressive Multi-Modal Fusion for Robust 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07475 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07475/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01186/) (2015)
- [PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05625/) (2022)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [FUTR3D: A Unified Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10642/) (2022)
- [Learning 3D Representations from 2D Pre-trained Models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06785/) (2022)
- [DeepInteraction: 3D Object Detection via Modality Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11112/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Label-Efficient LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with 2D-3D Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03299/) (2025)
- [Hyperspectral Adapter for Semantic Segmentation with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20107/) (2025)
- [ForecastOcc: Vision-based Semantic Occupancy Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08006/) (2026)
- [Open-Set LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation Guided by Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13265/) (2025)
- [UP-Fuse: Uncertainty-guided LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19349/) (2026)
- [Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23172/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Previous-Traversal Point Cloud Map Priors for Camera-Based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25405/) (2026)
- [GhostPoint: Self-Supervised Representation Learning by Hallucinating Occluded LiDAR Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14428/) (2026)
- [Effort-Based Criticality Metrics for Evaluating 3D Perception Errors in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28029/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Vision-Based Point Cloud Map Priors for Camera-Based 3D Object Detection and Online Vectorized HD Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26325/) (2026)
- [Perception Beyond the Visible: Incompleteness-Aware Scene Understanding for Robot Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18670/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-sensor fusion is crucial for accurate 3D object detection in autonomous driving, with cameras and LiDAR being the most commonly used sensors. However, existing methods perform sensor fusion in a single view by projecting features from both modalities either in Bird's Eye View (BEV) or Perspective View (PV), thus sacrificing complementary information such as height or geometric proportions. To address this limitation, we propose ProFusion3D, a progressive fusion framework that combines features in both BEV and PV at both intermediate and object query levels. Our architecture hierarchically fuses local and global features, enhancing the robustness of 3D object detection. Additionally, we introduce a self-supervised mask modeling pre-training strategy to improve multi-modal representation learning and data efficiency through three novel objectives. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets conclusively demonstrate the efficacy of ProFusion3D. Moreover, ProFusion3D is robust to sensor failure, demonstrating strong performance when only one modality is available.