Bi-Level Routing and Sparse Spatial Attention based Multi-View BEV 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jing Zhang, Jiaqi Liu, Zibo Wang
Organizations: Stuart Weitzman School of Design University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, USA · Courant Institute of Mathematical Science New York University New York, USA
Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based multi-view 3D object detection suffers from challenges of computational complexity, multi-scale feature extraction, and efficiency of dense 2D-to-BEV view transformation. To address these problems, this paper proposes an improved BEV 3D object detection algorithm Sparse-BEVNet. Firstly, a Bi-Level Routing Attention (BRA) mechanism is introduced into the image feature extraction network to reduce the computational burden of the backbone. Second, Cascaded Group Attention (CGA) is employed in the feature fusion module, which enhances deep interaction across features of different hierarchical levels without introducing additional computational overhead. Furthermore, a Sparse Spatial Cross-Attention mechanism is adopted to replace the conventional dense view projection pipeline. Experimental results on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 45.2% and a nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of 54.5%, corresponding to 3.6% and 2.8% improvements relative to the baseline model, respectively.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overall architecture of the proposed Sparse-BEVNet.
Method
Backbone
mAP (%)
NDS (%)
FPS
FCOS3D
ResNet-101
29.5
37.2
12
DETR3D
ResNet-101
30.3
37.4
14
BEVFormer-S
ResNet-101
41.6
51.7
15
Ours
BiFormer
45.2
54.5
22
TABLE I: Performance comparison of different multi-view 3D object detection algorithms on the nuScenes validation set
BRA
CGA
SSCA
mAP (%)
NDS (%)
FPS
41.6
51.7
15
✓
42.8
52.6
17
✓
✓
43.7
53.4
16
✓
✓
✓
45.2
54.5
22
TABLE II: Ablation results of core components in Sparse-BEVNet
Fusion Resolution Tiers
mAP (%)
NDS (%)
Deep layers only {C4,C5}
40.8
51.0
Partial cascade {C3,C4,C5}
43.1
52.8
Full cascade {C2,C3,C4,C5} (Proposed)
45.2
54.5
TABLE III: Comparison of alternative multi-scale merging paths in the CGA neck
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations are the dominant paradigm for 3D perception in autonomous driving, providing a unified spatial canvas where detection and segmentation features are geometrically registered to the same physical coordinate system. However, existing radar-camera fusion methods treat these tasks in isolation, missing the opportunity for cross-task feature sharing: object-level geometric cues from detection can sharpen segmentation, while dense road-layout context from segmentation can anchor detection. We propose CTAB (Cross-Task Attention Bridge), a bidirectional module that exchanges features between detection and segmentation branches via multi-scale deformable attention in shared BEV space. CTAB is integrated into a multi-task framework with an Instance Normalization-based segmentation decoder and learnable BEV upsampling to provide a more detailed BEV representation. On nuScenes, CTAB improves segmentation on 7 classes over the joint multi-task baseline at essentially neutral detection. On a 4-class subset (drivable area, pedestrian crossing, walkway, vehicle), our joint multi-task model achieves 51.0 mIoU-4 while simultaneously providing competitive 3D detection.
Camera-based bird's-eye view (BEV) perception methods such as Fast-BEV have demonstrated promising results with fast inference speed and competitive accuracy. However, their robustness to real-world corruptions remains insufficiently explored, posing risks for autonomous driving deployment where environmental variations are inevitable. In this paper, we propose Sparse Recovery Bird's-Eye View Model Soup (SR-BEVS), a sparse recovery learning approach that simultaneously improves clean accuracy and corruption robustness without requiring additional data or architectural modifications. Our method identifies pruning candidates based on layer-wise weight magnitudes, applies random pruning to create diverse sparse models, and retrains each model with a randomly sampled learning rate. By averaging these diverse recovered models into a single dense model, we achieve enhanced robustness against various corruptions while introducing zero inference overhead. We further provide a mode connectivity analysis demonstrating that our pruning-based diversification preserves the connected low-loss basin necessary for stable weight averaging. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate up to 33.8% improvement in corruption robustness and a 1.8% gain in clean accuracy over the Fast-BEV baseline, with consistent improvements across sensor noise, weather distortions, and illumination changes. Our simple yet effective approach may be applicable to other BEV models.
Jinwoo Chung, Sangho An, Hyunsung Park +1
Kookmin University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Hyundai Motor Company · Corresponding author: Jangho Kim
Nowadays, an increasing number of works fuse LiDAR and RGB data in the bird's-eye view (BEV) space for 3D object detection in autonomous driving systems. However, existing methods suffer from over-reliance on the LiDAR branch, with insufficient exploration of RGB information. To tackle this issue, we propose Fusion4CA, which is built upon the classic BEVFusion framework and dedicated to fully exploiting visual input with plug-and-play components. Specifically, a contrastive alignment module is designed to calibrate image features with 3D geometry, and a camera auxiliary branch is introduced to mine RGB information sufficiently during training. For further performance enhancement, we leverage an off-the-shelf cognitive adapter to make the most of pretrained image weights, and integrate a standard coordinate attention module into the fusion stage as a supplementary boost. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 69.7% mAP with only 6 training epochs and a mere 3.48% increase in inference parameters, yielding a 1.2% improvement over the baseline which is fully trained for 20 epochs. Extensive experiments in a simulated lunar environment further validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Our code will be released through Fusion4CA.
Kang Luo, Xin Chen, Yangyi Xiao +1
IRMV Lab, the Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.