# CoST: Efficient Collaborative Perception From Unified Spatiotemporal Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [Exploring Object-Centric Temporal Modeling for Efficient Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11926/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Time Will Tell: New Outlooks and A Baseline for Temporal Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02443/) (2022)
- [F-Cooper: Feature based Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicle Edge Computing System Using 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06459/) (2019)
- [Cooper: Cooperative Perception for Connected Autonomous Vehicles based on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05265/) (2019)
- [Sparse4D: Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Sparse Spatial-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10581/) (2022)
- [V2V4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07601/) (2023)
- [Who2com: Collaborative Perception via Learnable Handshake Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09575/) (2020)
- [Cooperative Perception for 3D Object Detection in Driving Scenarios using Infrastructure Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12147/) (2019)
- [Latency-Aware Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08560/) (2022)
- [DSDNet: Deep Structured self-Driving Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06041/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08451/) (2022)
- [Towards Vehicle-to-everything Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16714/) (2023)
- [Flow-Based Feature Fusion for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01682/) (2023)
- [UMC: A Unified Bandwidth-efficient and Multi-resolution based Collaborative Perception Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12400/) (2023)
- [Select2Col: Leveraging Spatial-Temporal Importance of Semantic Information for Efficient Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16517/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SafeCoop: Unravelling Full Stack Safety in Agentic Collaborative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18123/) (2025)
- [JigsawComm: Joint Semantic Feature Encoding and Transmission for Communication-Efficient Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17843/) (2025)
- [Linking Modality Isolation in Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00609/) (2026)
- [RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for 4D Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00654/) (2026)
- [V2X-DSC: Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception with Distributed Source Coding Guided Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00687/) (2026)
- [When the City Teaches the Car: Label-Free 3D Perception from Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16742/) (2026)
- [CoAnchor: Robust Collaborative Perception under Spatio-Temporal Misalignment via Object-Level Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21055/) (2026)
- [Multi-Source and Multi-Dimensional Information Fusion in Resource-Constrained Edge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13298/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collaborative perception shares information among different agents and helps solving problems that individual agents may face, e.g., occlusions and small sensing range. Prior methods usually separate the multi-agent fusion and multi-time fusion into two consecutive steps. In contrast, this paper proposes an efficient collaborative perception that aggregates the observations from different agents (space) and different times into a unified spatio-temporal space simultanesouly. The unified spatio-temporal space brings two benefits, i.e., efficient feature transmission and superior feature fusion. 1) Efficient feature transmission: each static object yields a single observation in the spatial temporal space, and thus only requires transmission only once (whereas prior methods re-transmit all the object features multiple times). 2) superior feature fusion: merging the multi-agent and multi-time fusion into a unified spatial-temporal aggregation enables a more holistic perspective, thereby enhancing perception performance in challenging scenarios. Consequently, our Collaborative perception with Spatio-temporal Transformer (CoST) gains improvement in both efficiency and accuracy. Notably, CoST is not tied to any specific method and is compatible with a majority of previous methods, enhancing their accuracy while reducing the transmission bandwidth.