SlimComm: Doppler-Guided Sparse Queries for Bandwidth-Efficient Cooperative 3-D Perception

Abstract: Collaborative perception allows connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to overcome occlusion and limited sensor range by sharing intermediate features. Yet transmitting dense Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature maps can overwhelm the bandwidth available for inter-vehicle communication. We present SlimComm, a communication-efficient framework that integrates 4D radar Doppler with a query-driven sparse scheme. SlimComm builds a motion-centric dynamic map to distinguish moving from static objects and generates two query types: (i) reference queries on dynamic and high-confidence regions, and (ii) exploratory queries probing occluded areas via a two-stage offset. Only query-specific BEV features are exchanged and fused through multi-scale gated deformable attention, reducing payload while preserving accuracy. For evaluation, we release OPV2V-R and Adver-City-R, CARLA-based datasets with per-point Doppler radar. SlimComm achieves up to 90% lower bandwidth than full-map sharing while matching or surpassing prior baselines across varied traffic densities and occlusions. Dataset and code will be available at: https://url.fzi.de/SlimComm.