# BOLT: Online Lightweight Adaptation for Preparation-Free Heterogeneous Cooperative Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [V2V4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07601/) (2023)
- [Robust Collaborative 3D Object Detection in Presence of Pose Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07214/) (2022)
- [Cooperative Perception for 3D Object Detection in Driving Scenarios using Infrastructure Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12147/) (2019)
- [Collaborative Perception in Autonomous Driving: Methods, Datasets and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06262/) (2023)
- [An Extensible Framework for Open Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13964/) (2024)
- [Latency-Aware Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08560/) (2022)
- [HM-ViT: Hetero-modal Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative perception with vision transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10628/) (2023)
- [Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Information Filling with Codebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04966/) (2024)
- [V2X-Real: a Large-Scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16034/) (2024)
- [Asynchrony-Robust Collaborative Perception via Bird's Eye View Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16940/) (2023)
- [Test-Time Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20633/) (2025)
- [STAMP: Scalable Task And Model-agnostic Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18616/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Multi-Object Tracking with Conformal Uncertainty Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14346/) (2023)
- [QUEST: Query Stream for Practical Cooperative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01804/) (2023)
- [Dual Test-time Training for Out-of-distribution Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15620/) (2024)
- [One is Plenty: A Polymorphic Feature Interpreter for Immutable Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16799/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CoVLM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Cooperative Driving Question Answering and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35823/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing heterogeneous cooperative perception methods depend on prior preparation like offline joint training or tailored collaborator-model adaptation. Such preprocessing is, however, generally impractical in real scenarios, as agents are usually independently trained by different developers and meet occasionally online. This work investigates preparation-free heterogeneous cooperative perception, where agents use independently trained single-agent detectors without any pre-deployment coordination. We find direct cross-agent fusion under this setting greatly underperforms ego-only perception. We present BOLT, a lightweight plug-and-play module that adapts neighboring features online via ego-as-teacher distillation, requiring only ego predictions without ground-truth labels. BOLT leverages high-confidence ego perception features to guide cross-agent feature-domain alignment, while enabling neighbors to contribute features in the ego's low-confidence regions. With only 0.9M trainable parameters, BOLT improves AP@50 by up to 32.3 points over vanilla unadapted fusion in the preparation-free setting. It consistently outperforms ego-only results on DAIR-V2X and OPV2V, across different encoder pairs and fusion strategies. Code: https://github.com/sidiangongyuan/BOLT.