WhisperNet: A Scalable Solution for Bandwidth-Efficient Collaboration

TL;DR

WhisperNet introduces a receiver-centric, bandwidth-aware framework for collaborative perception that dynamically allocates communication resources, significantly improving efficiency and performance in autonomous driving scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a novel global coordination paradigm with lightweight metadata and dynamic feature routing, outperforming fixed-rate and object-centric methods.

Findings

Achieves 2.4% higher AP@0.7 on OPV2V with only 0.5% of full bandwidth.

Boosts baseline performance using just 5% of bandwidth.

Maintains robustness under localization noise.

Abstract

Collaborative perception is vital for autonomous driving yet remains constrained by tight communication budgets. Earlier work reduced bandwidth by compressing full feature maps with fixed-rate encoders, which adapts poorly to a changing environment, and it further evolved into spatial selection methods that improve efficiency by focusing on salient regions, but this object-centric approach often sacrifices global context, weakening holistic scene understanding. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textit{WhisperNet}, a bandwidth-aware framework that proposes a novel, receiver-centric paradigm for global coordination across agents. Senders generate lightweight saliency metadata, while the receiver formulates a global request plan that dynamically budgets feature contributions across agents and features, retrieving only the most informative features. A collaborative feature routing module then aligns related messages before fusion to ensure structural consistency. Extensive experiments show that WhisperNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AP@0.7 on OPV2V by 2.4\% with only 0.5\% of the communication cost. As a plug-and-play component, it boosts strong baselines with merely 5\% of full bandwidth while maintaining robustness under localization noise. These results demonstrate that globally-coordinated allocation across \textit{what} and \textit{where} to share is the key to achieving efficient collaborative perception.