# VLC Fusion: Vision-Language Conditioned Sensor Fusion for Robust Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12715/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01378/) (2023)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [PointFusion: Deep Sensor Fusion for 3D Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10871/) (2017)
- [M2Det: A Single-Shot Object Detector based on Multi-Level Feature Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04533/) (2018)
- [PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04925/) (2023)
- [CAFuser: Condition-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Robust Semantic Perception of Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10791/) (2024)
- [How Do We Fail? Stress Testing Perception in Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14155/) (2022)
- [RGB-X Object Detection via Scene-Specific Fusion Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19372/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Uncertainties for Deep Multi-modal Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00216/) (2020)
- [Fairness in Autonomous Driving: Towards Understanding Confounding Factors in Object Detection under Challenging Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00219/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although fusing multiple sensor modalities can enhance object detection performance, existing fusion approaches often overlook subtle variations in environmental conditions and sensor inputs. As a result, they struggle to adaptively weight each modality under such variations. To address this challenge, we introduce Vision-Language Conditioned Fusion (VLC Fusion), a novel fusion framework that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to condition the fusion process on nuanced environmental cues. By capturing high-level environmental context such as darkness, rain, and camera blurring, the VLM guides the model to dynamically adjust modality weights based on the current scene, ensuring robustness against environmental shifts. We evaluate VLC Fusion on real-world autonomous driving and military target detection datasets that include image, LIDAR, and mid-wave infrared modalities. Our experiments show that VLC Fusion consistently outperforms conventional fusion baselines, achieving improved detection accuracy in both seen and unseen scenarios.