SenseWeather: Multimodal Sensing for Robust Robotic Perception under Extreme Conditions

We present OctoSense, an open-source sensor platform with stereo RGB and event cameras, LiDAR, a thermal camera, an inertial measurement unit, RTK-corrected global positioning system, and proprioception (CAN bus data from a car, and joint angles for a quadruped robot). The eponymous OctoSense dataset contains 59 hours of time-synchronized driving data across different types of environments at different times of the day, including situations with highly degraded sensors. We demonstrate multi-modal self-supervised learning using such real-world robotics data, where sensors have different representations, frequencies, latencies and noise. Our approach, a "late-fusion" masked autoencoder, (i) uses modality-specific tokenizers to account for different spatiotemporal characteristics of these sensors, and (ii) caches modality-specific tokens at inference time to process new measurements as they come. This architecture (i) is fast (6.68 ms and 112 ms on NVIDIA 5090 and Orin NX respectively, to compute the representation), (ii) performs better than existing image-only foundation models on tasks such as estimation of optical flow, depth, semantic segmentation, and ego-motion (translation, rotation, and steering angle), and (iii) predicts robustly at nighttime or in situations where sensory data is degraded. See our project page for links to the dataset, code, and supplementary videos: https://abisulco.com/octosense/.

Robust depth completion is fundamental to real-world 3D scene understanding, yet existing RGB--LiDAR fusion methods degrade significantly under adverse weather, where both camera images and LiDAR measurements suffer from weather-induced corruption. In this paper, we introduce AURORA-KITTI, the first large-scale, physics-consistent synthetic RGB-LiDAR benchmark for any-weather depth completion and denoising. We further formulate Depth Completion and Denoising~(DCD) as a unified task that reconstructs clean dense metric depth from weather-corrupted RGB images and sparse LiDAR inputs while suppressing weather-induced noise. AURORA-KITTI contains over 82K weather-consistent RGB--LiDAR pairs with metric depth supervision, spanning diverse weather types, three severity levels, day/night scenes, paired clean references, lens occlusion conditions, and textual descriptions.Moreover, we provide DDCD as a strong and efficient distillation-based reference baseline. DDCD is trained on AURORA-KITTI using a frozen teacher applied to paired clean RGB images only during training; at inference, it uses weather-corrupted RGB and sparse LiDAR. Experiments on AURORA-KITTI and the real-world DENSE benchmark show that existing depth completion and foundation depth models remain vulnerable under severe weather, while DDCD improves over weather-aware retraining. Controlled experiments further show that physics-consistent adverse-weather data is the dominant driver of robustness, with clean-prior distillation providing complementary gains. Comparisons with off-the-shelf zero-shot methods use different training protocols; same-data retraining and component ablations separately quantify the contributions of weather-aware data and DDCD. Github: https://github.com/Warwick-Jocelyn/AURORA-KITTI.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance on visual perception and reasoning tasks with RGB imagery, yet they remain fragile under common degradations, such as fog, blur, or low-light conditions. Infrared (IR) imaging, a well-established complement to RGB, offers inherent robustness in these conditions, but its integration into MLLMs remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DUALVISION, a lightweight fusion module that efficiently incorporates IR-RGB information into MLLMs via patch-level localized cross-attention. To support training and evaluation and to facilitate future research, we also introduce DV-204K, a dataset of ~25K publicly available aligned IR-RGB image pairs with 204K modality-specific QA annotations, and DV-500, a benchmark of 500 IR-RGB image pairs with 500 QA pairs designed for evaluating cross-modal reasoning. Leveraging these datasets, we benchmark both open- and closed-source MLLMs and demonstrate that DUALVISION delivers strong empirical performance under a wide range of visual degradations. Our code and dataset are available at https://abrarmajeedi.github.io/dualvision.