# Self-Supervised Sparse Sensor Fusion for Long Range Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13995 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13995/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [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)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Tri-Perspective View for Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07817/) (2023)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)

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

- [TruckDrive: Long-Range Autonomous Highway Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02413/) (2026)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [NeSy-Route: A Neuro-Symbolic Benchmark for Constrained Route Planning in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16307/) (2026)
- [Horizon3D: Sparse Radar-Camera Fusion for Long-Range 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31096/) (2026)
- [CRISP: A Spatiotemporal Camera-Radar Backbone for Driving via Forecasting-Based World-Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04541/) (2026)
- [SparseOcc++: Geometry-Aware Sparse Latent Representation for Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04732/) (2026)
- [HMS-SCP: Task-Oriented Multi-Scale Semantic Communication for V2X Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14603/) (2026)
- [TriO: Tri-Modal Unsupervised Occupancy World Model for Anything Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Outside of urban hubs, autonomous cars and trucks have to master driving on intercity highways. Safe, long-distance highway travel at speeds exceeding 100 km/h demands perception distances of at least 250 m, which is about five times the 50-100m typically addressed in city driving, to allow sufficient planning and braking margins. Increasing the perception ranges also allows to extend autonomy from light two-ton passenger vehicles to large-scale forty-ton trucks, which need a longer planning horizon due to their high inertia. However, most existing perception approaches focus on shorter ranges and rely on Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations, which incur quadratic increases in memory and compute costs as distance grows. To overcome this limitation, we built on top of a sparse representation and introduced an efficient 3D encoding of multi-modal and temporal features, along with a novel self-supervised pre-training scheme that enables large-scale learning from unlabeled camera-LiDAR data. Our approach extends perception distances to 250 meters and achieves an 26.6% improvement in mAP in object detection and a decrease of 30.5% in Chamfer Distance in LiDAR forecasting compared to existing methods, reaching distances up to 250 meters. Project Page: https://light.princeton.edu/lrs4fusion/