Dereje Shenkut

Dereje Shenkut, Vijayakumar Bhagavatula

Multi-agent collaborative perception (CP) is a promising paradigm for improving autonomous driving safety, particularly for vulnerable road users like pedestrians, via robust 3D perception. However, existing CP approaches often optimize for vehicle detection performance metrics, underperforming on smaller, safety-critical objects such as pedestrians, where detection failures can be catastrophic. Furthermore, previous CP methods rely on full feature exchange rather than communicating only salient features that help reduce false negatives. To this end, we present FocalComm, a novel collaborative perception framework that focuses on exchanging hard-instance-oriented features among connected collaborative agents. FocalComm consists of two key novel designs: (1) a learnable progressive hard instance mining (HIM) module to extract hard instance-oriented features per agent, and (2) a query-based feature-level (intermediate) fusion technique that dynamically weights these identified features during collaboration. We show that FocalComm outperforms state-of-the-art collaborative perception methods on two challenging real-world datasets (V2X-Real and DAIR-V2X) across both vehicle-centric and infrastructure-centric collaborative setups. FocalComm also shows a strong performance gain in pedestrian detection in V2X-Real.

Dereje Shenkut, B. V. K Vijaya Kumar

Multi-agent collaborative perception (CP) improves scene understanding by sharing information across connected agents such as autonomous vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and robots. Communication bandwidth, however, constrains scalability. We present ReVQom, a learned feature codec that preserves spatial identity while compressing intermediate features. ReVQom is an end-to-end method that compresses feature dimensions via a simple bottleneck network followed by multi-stage residual vector quantization (RVQ). This allows only per-pixel code indices to be transmitted, reducing payloads from 8192 bits per pixel (bpp) of uncompressed 32-bit float features to 6-30 bpp per agent with minimal accuracy loss. On DAIR-V2X real-world CP dataset, ReVQom achieves 273x compression at 30 bpp to 1365x compression at 6 bpp. At 18 bpp (455x), ReVQom matches or outperforms raw-feature CP, and at 6-12 bpp it enables ultra-low-bandwidth operation with graceful degradation. ReVQom allows efficient and accurate multi-agent collaborative perception with a step toward practical V2X deployment.