CoDTS: Enhancing Sparsely Supervised Collaborative Perception with a Dual Teacher-Student FrameworkYushan Han, Hui Zhang, Honglei Zhang et al.
Current collaborative perception methods often rely on fully annotated datasets, which can be expensive to obtain in practical situations. To reduce annotation costs, some works adopt sparsely supervised learning techniques and generate pseudo labels for the missing instances. However, these methods fail to achieve an optimal confidence threshold that harmonizes the quality and quantity of pseudo labels. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Collaborative perception Dual Teacher-Student framework (CoDTS), which employs adaptive complementary learning to produce both high-quality and high-quantity pseudo labels. Specifically, the Main Foreground Mining (MFM) module generates high-quality pseudo labels based on the prediction of the static teacher. Subsequently, the Supplement Foreground Mining (SFM) module ensures a balance between the quality and quantity of pseudo labels by adaptively identifying missing instances based on the prediction of the dynamic teacher. Additionally, the Neighbor Anchor Sampling (NAS) module is incorporated to enhance the representation of pseudo labels. To promote the adaptive complementary learning, we implement a staged training strategy that trains the student and dynamic teacher in a mutually beneficial manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the CoDTS effectively ensures an optimal balance of pseudo labels in both quality and quantity, establishing a new state-of-the-art in sparsely supervised collaborative perception. The code is available at https://github.com/CatOneTwo/CoDTS.
6.2CVOct 15, 2025
CoDS: Enhancing Collaborative Perception in Heterogeneous Scenarios via Domain SeparationYushan Han, Hui Zhang, Honglei Zhang et al.
Collaborative perception has been proven to improve individual perception in autonomous driving through multi-agent interaction. Nevertheless, most methods often assume identical encoders for all agents, which does not hold true when these models are deployed in real-world applications. To realize collaborative perception in actual heterogeneous scenarios, existing methods usually align neighbor features to those of the ego vehicle, which is vulnerable to noise from domain gaps and thus fails to address feature discrepancies effectively. Moreover, they adopt transformer-based modules for domain adaptation, which causes the model inference inefficiency on mobile devices. To tackle these issues, we propose CoDS, a Collaborative perception method that leverages Domain Separation to address feature discrepancies in heterogeneous scenarios. The CoDS employs two feature alignment modules, i.e., Lightweight Spatial-Channel Resizer (LSCR) and Distribution Alignment via Domain Separation (DADS). Besides, it utilizes the Domain Alignment Mutual Information (DAMI) loss to ensure effective feature alignment. Specifically, the LSCR aligns the neighbor feature across spatial and channel dimensions using a lightweight convolutional layer. Subsequently, the DADS mitigates feature distribution discrepancy with encoder-specific and encoder-agnostic domain separation modules. The former removes domain-dependent information and the latter captures task-related information. During training, the DAMI loss maximizes the mutual information between aligned heterogeneous features to enhance the domain separation process. The CoDS employs a fully convolutional architecture, which ensures high inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the CoDS effectively mitigates feature discrepancies in heterogeneous scenarios and achieves a trade-off between detection accuracy and inference efficiency.