# One Model to Translate Them All: Universal Any-to-Any Translation for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17907 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17907/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [MoE-LLaVA: Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15947/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02202/) (2022)
- [Uni-MoE: Scaling Unified Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11273/) (2024)
- [An Extensible Framework for Open Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13964/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08451/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Mixture of Experts: An Auto-Tuning Approach for Efficient Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14297/) (2024)
- [STAMP: Scalable Task And Model-agnostic Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18616/) (2025)
- [Collaborative Perception for Connected and Autonomous Driving: Challenges, Possible Solutions and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01544/) (2024)
- [SI-MIL: Taming Deep MIL for Self-Interpretability in Gigapixel Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15010/) (2023)
- [A Survey and Framework of Cooperative Perception: From Heterogeneous Singleton to Hierarchical Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10590/) (2022)
- [LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04004/) (2025)
- [One is Plenty: A Polymorphic Feature Interpreter for Immutable Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16799/) (2024)
- [TimeExpert: An Expert-Guided Video LLM for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01699/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Intermediate Fusion Methods for Collaborative Perception Categorized by Real World Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16139/) (2024)
- [NegoCollab: A Common Representation Negotiation Approach for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27647/) (2025)
- [Towards Accurate and Efficient 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Mixture of Experts Computing System on Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04123/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

By sharing intermediate features, collaborative perception extends each agent's sensing beyond standalone limits, but real-world feature modality heterogeneity remains a key barrier to effective fusion. Most existing methods, including direct adaption and protocol-based transformation, typically rely on training adapters for newly emerging feature modalities and often require additional retraining or fine-tuning. Such repeated training is costly and is often infeasible across manufacturers due to model and data privacy constraints, limiting real-world scalability. To address this issue, we propose UniTrans, a universal any-to-any feature modality translation model that instantiates translators on the fly for arbitrary modalities. UniTrans pretrains a bank of translator expert parameters and learns their combination coefficients as a function of source-to-target modality mapping. The mapping is measured in a modality-intrinsic latent space, where an intrinsic encoder extracts modality-specific yet scene-invariant codes from single-frame intermediate features, enabling UniTrans to instantiate translators in a zero-shot manner. Experiments on OPV2V-H and DAIR-V2X demonstrate that UniTrans consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both simulated and real-world settings, enabling efficient any-to-any translation through a universal model. The code is available at https://github.com/CheeryLeeyy/UniTrans.