# CauseCollab: Causal Unified and Modality-Agnostic Network for Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03818/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [OPV2V: An Open Benchmark Dataset and Fusion Pipeline for Perception with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07644/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Causality for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10500/) (2019)
- [CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02202/) (2022)
- [Learning Distilled Collaboration Graph for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00643/) (2021)
- [A Riemannian Network for SPD Matrix Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04233/) (2016)
- [When2com: Multi-Agent Perception via Communication Graph Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00176/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08451/) (2022)
- [Asynchrony-Robust Collaborative Perception via Bird's Eye View Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16940/) (2023)
- [BM2CP: Efficient Collaborative Perception with LiDAR-Camera Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14702/) (2023)
- [Multi-Scale Finetuning for Encoder-based Time Series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14087/) (2025)
- [CWNet: Causal Wavelet Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10689/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collaborative perception enhances environment understanding through multi-agent information sharing, but its performance in real-world scenarios is constrained by heterogeneous sensor modalities and model architectures. Recent protocol-based two-stage methods alleviate this problem by mapping heterogeneous features into a shared protocol space; however, independently trained modality-specific converters often generate modality-specific pseudo-protocol distributions, leading to semantic inconsistency and error accumulation, which is particularly pronounced in scenarios with large modality discrepancies. To address this issue, we propose CauseCollab, a causal unified and modality-agnostic network. CauseCollab formulates representation learning in the protocol space from a causal perspective, explicitly disentangling semantic factors from modality-specific statistical confounders via causal metric learning. Meanwhile, CauseCollab adopts context-guided Unified Converter for heterogeneous modalities to ensure cross-modal semantic consistency. In addition, integrating new modalities only requires training adapters with minimal parameters. Extensive experiments on the OPV2V and DAIR-V2X datasets demonstrate that CauseCollab achieves state-of-the-art performance, with more significant gains in scenarios involving large modality gaps.