CAFuser: Condition-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Robust Semantic Perception of Driving Scenes

Abstract

Leveraging multiple sensors is crucial for robust semantic perception in autonomous driving, as each sensor type has complementary strengths and weaknesses. However, existing sensor fusion methods often treat sensors uniformly across all conditions, leading to suboptimal performance. By contrast, we propose a novel, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">condition-aware multimodal</i> fusion approach for robust semantic perception of driving scenes. Our method, CAFuser, uses an RGB camera input to classify environmental conditions and generate a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Condition Token</i> that guides the fusion of multiple sensor modalities. We further newly introduce modality-specific feature adapters to align diverse sensor inputs into a shared latent space, enabling efficient integration with a single and shared pre-trained backbone. By dynamically adapting sensor fusion based on the actual condition, our model significantly improves robustness and accuracy, especially in adverse-condition scenarios. CAFuser ranks first on the public MUSES benchmarks, achieving 59.7 PQ for multimodal panoptic and 78.2 mIoU for semantic segmentation, and also sets the new state of the art on DeLiVER.