One is Plenty: A Polymorphic Feature Interpreter for Immutable Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception in autonomous driving significantly enhances the perception capabilities of individual agents. Immutable heterogeneity in collaborative perception, where agents have different and fixed perception networks, presents a major challenge due to the semantic gap in their exchanged intermediate features without modifying the perception networks. Most existing methods bridge the semantic gap through interpreters. However, they either require training a new interpreter for each new agent type, limiting extensibility, or rely on a two-stage interpretation via an intermediate standardized semantic space, causing cumulative semantic loss. To achieve both extensibility in immutable heterogeneous scenarios and low-loss feature interpretation, we propose PolyInter, a polymorphic feature interpreter. It contains an extension point through which emerging new agents can seamlessly integrate by overriding only their specific prompts, which are learnable parameters intended to guide the interpretation, while reusing PolyInter's remaining parameters. By leveraging polymorphism, our design ensures that a single interpreter is sufficient to accommodate diverse agents and interpret their features into the ego agent's semantic space. Experiments conducted on the OPV2V dataset demonstrate that PolyInter improves collaborative perception precision by up to 11.1% compared to SOTA interpreters, while comparable results can be achieved by training only 1.4% of PolyInter's parameters when adapting to new agents.