Agent-Wise Test-Time Normalization for Camera-Based Cooperative Perception with Corrupted Collaborators

Abstract

Intermediate-fusion cooperative perception lets a vehicle detect objects beyond its own field of view by fusing features shared by nearby agents. When only a collaborator's cameras are degraded by fog, motion blur or exposure errors, the features it shares drift away from the training distribution while the ego input stays clean, and cooperation can become worse than not cooperating at all. Test-time batch-normalization adaptation, the standard training-free remedy, estimates statistics over the pooled batch of all agents and therefore normalizes both the clean ego and the corrupted collaborator with a mixture of two distributions. We show that this mixing harms even the clean ego: when the ego shares BN statistics with a corrupted collaborator, its detection from its own features drops by 3.58 to 6.68 AP@0.5 points although its cameras are untouched. We propose AgentNorm, an agent-wise test-time normalization that i) estimates the normalization statistics of every collaborator from its own current observation and ii) anchors the ego to its source statistics, so that the ego path remains exactly the original model. AgentNorm has no learnable parameters, needs no gradients or labels, is independent of the order of test frames, and runs locally on each agent without changing the transmitted features. On camera-based OPV2V with four fusion checkpoints and collaborator-only corruptions, AgentNorm raises AP@0.5 under severity-5 fog from 29.42-37.25 to 43.32-58.86 and outperforms pooled normalization by 5.53-12.94 points under fog and motion blur, at an extra latency of 2.3 ms per frame. On the real-world DAIR-V2X-C dataset, it outperforms pooled normalization in all ten infrastructure-corruption settings. We also report the cases it does not fix: occlusion, which removes image content rather than shifting feature statistics, and the case in which all agents share the same shift.