PEARL: A Lightweight Prompt-based Feature Interpreter Framework for Real-Time, Anonymous, and Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

Armin Maleki, Hayder Radha

Heterogeneity across Collaborative Perception (CP) agents is a major challenge for emerging CP frameworks due to domain gaps from differing sensors, architectures, and training data. Prior works mitigate this challenge by aligning features in a unified space via model retraining or per-agent-type interpreters. These strategies (a) require access to neighbor configurations, (b) do not fully address real-time CP deployment, and (c) generalize poorly to unseen agents joining at run time. To overcome these challenges, we present PEARL, a Prompt-Embedding framework for Anonymous and Real-time Lightweight heterogeneous CP. PEARL supports multiple CP interpreters and selects one for a new-joining agent in real time using two lightweight, multi-scale interpreters trained in parallel: a sparse-detection (LWSD) interpreter that aligns salient regions for cooperative detection, and a dense, domain-invariant (LWDDI) interpreter that produces agent-invariant features for fast interpreter selection. Both interpreters use low-rank visual prompts to reduce computation, storage, and model complexity. Extensive experiments on simulated (OPV2V, V2XSet) and real (DAIR-V2X) datasets show that PEARL…