Model-Agnostic Multi-Agent Perception Framework

Existing multi-agent perception systems assume that every agent utilizes the same models with identical parameters and architecture, which is often impractical in the real world. The significant performance boost brought by the multi-agent system can be degraded dramatically when the perception models are noticeably different. In this work, we propose a model-agnostic multi-agent framework to reduce the negative effect caused by model discrepancies and maintain confidentiality. Specifically, we consider the perception heterogeneity between agents by integrating a novel uncertainty calibrator which can eliminate the bias among agents' predicted confidence scores. Each agent performs such calibration independently on a standard public database, and therefore the intellectual property can be protected. To further refine the detection accuracy, we also propose a new algorithm called Promotion-Suppression Aggregation (PSA) that considers not only the confidence score of proposals but also the spatial agreement of their neighbors. Our experiments emphasize the necessity of model calibration across different agents, and the results show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods for 3D object detection on the open OPV2V dataset.