Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception

Abstract: Existing multi-agent perception algorithms usually select to share deep neural features extracted from raw sensing data between agents, achieving a trade-off between accuracy and communication bandwidth limit. However, these methods assume all agents have identical neural networks, which might not be practical in the real world. The transmitted features can have a large domain gap when the models differ, leading to a dramatic performance drop in multi-agent perception. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight framework to bridge such domain gaps for multi-agent perception, which can be a plug-in module for most existing systems while maintaining confidentiality. Our framework consists of a learnable feature resizer to align features in multiple dimensions and a sparse cross-domain transformer for domain adaption. Extensive experiments on the public multi-agent perception dataset V2XSet have demonstrated that our method can effectively bridge the gap for features from different domains and outperform other baseline methods significantly by at least 8% for point-cloud-based 3D object detection.