# Think as Needed: Geometry-Driven Adaptive Perception for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10117 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10117/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12077/) (2023)
- [BranchyNet: Fast Inference via Early Exiting from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01686/) (2017)
- [Hypergraph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09401/) (2018)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00663/) (2024)
- [Intrinsic dimension of data representations in deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12784/) (2019)
- [Estimating the intrinsic dimension of datasets by a minimal neighborhood information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06992/) (2018)
- [SparseDrive: End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Sparse Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19620/) (2024)
- [Nested Learning: The Illusion of Deep Learning Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24695/) (2025)
- [Building Deep Networks on Grassmann Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05742/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Decision Value of Perception Compute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35910/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving scenes range from empty highways to dense intersections with dozens of interacting road users, yet current 3D detection models apply a fixed computation budget to every frame, wasting resources on simple scenes while lacking capacity for complex ones. Existing approaches compound this problem: Transformer-based interaction models scale quadratically with the number of detected objects, and frame-by-frame processing causes the system to immediately forget objects the moment they become occluded. We propose Enhanced HOPE, an adaptive perception architecture that measures the geometric complexity of each incoming LiDAR frame using an unsupervised statistical estimator and routes it through a shallow or deep processing path accordingly, requiring no manual scene labels. To keep interaction modeling efficient, we replace quadratic pairwise attention with a linear-time subspace-based network that groups nearby objects into clusters and processes them jointly. The computational savings from these two mechanisms free up resources for a persistent temporal memory module that retains previously detected objects and traffic rules across frames, enabling the system to recall occluded objects seconds after they disappear from view. On the nuScenes and CARLA benchmarks, Enhanced HOPE reduces latency by 38% on simple scenes with no accuracy loss, improves mean Average Precision by 2.7 points on rare long-tail scenarios, and tracks objects through occlusions lasting over 5 seconds, where all tested baselines fail.