# PRI-Net: A Lightweight Multimodal Framework for 3D UAV Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14469/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Information Bottleneck: Learning Minimal Sufficient Unimodal and Multimodal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17444/) (2022)
- [MMAUD: A Comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset for Modern Miniature Drone Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03706/) (2024)
- [Point RCNN: An Angle-Free Framework for Rotated Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14328/) (2022)
- [Vision-based system for a real-time detection and following of UAV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00083/) (2022)
- [Meta-SimGNN: Adaptive and Robust WiFi Localization Across Dynamic Configurations and Diverse Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14076/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate 3D localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains challenging for existing multimodal approaches due to sparse LiDAR geometry, modality-imbalanced fusion, and redundant feature transmission over constrained edge-to-server links. To address these limitations, we propose PRI-Net, an efficient and lightweight multimodal fusion framework for UAV localization that integrates point cloud splatting, residual attention fusion, and an information bottleneck. Specifically, a 3D point cloud splatting (3DPCS) strategy is introduced to transform sparse LiDAR observations into geometrically consistent dense depth maps. A residual attention fusion (RAF) module is then designed to alleviate modal bias by using an image branch for coarse estimation and a gated fusion branch for refinement. In addition, a multimodal information bottleneck (MIB) module compacts features by filtering task-irrelevant redundancy. Experiments show that PRI-Net achieves high localization accuracy with lightweight architectures, while reducing feature dimensionality and improving edge-to-server UAV sensing efficiency and robustness.