# Cross-Level Sensor Fusion with Object Lists via Transformer for 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12884/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [PETRv2: A Unified Framework for 3D Perception from Multi-Camera Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01256/) (2022)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [CenterMask : Real-Time Anchor-Free Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06667/) (2019)
- [FUTR3D: A Unified Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10642/) (2022)
- [Fast Convergence of DETR with Spatially Modulated Co-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07448/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Sensor Fusion for Auto Driving Perception: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02703/) (2022)
- [Cross Modal Transformer: Towards Fast and Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01283/) (2023)
- [FusionRCNN: LiDAR-Camera Fusion for Two-stage 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10733/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In automotive sensor fusion systems, smart sensors and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) modules are commonly utilized. Sensor data from these systems are typically available only as processed object lists rather than raw sensor data from traditional sensors. Instead of processing other raw data separately and then fusing them at the object level, we propose an end-to-end cross-level fusion concept with Transformer, which integrates highly abstract object list information with raw camera images for 3D object detection. Object lists are fed into a Transformer as denoising queries and propagated together with learnable queries through the latter feature aggregation process. Additionally, a deformable Gaussian mask, derived from the positional and size dimensional priors from the object lists, is explicitly integrated into the Transformer decoder. This directs attention toward the target area of interest and accelerates model training convergence. Furthermore, as there is no public dataset containing object lists as a standalone modality, we propose an approach to generate pseudo object lists from ground-truth bounding boxes by simulating state noise and false positives and negatives. As the first work to conduct cross-level fusion, our approach shows substantial performance improvements over the vision-based baseline on the nuScenes dataset. It demonstrates its generalization capability over diverse noise levels of simulated object lists and real detectors.