MirrorComm: A Communication-Efficient Cooperative Perception Framework via Mirrored World Models

Abstract

Cooperative perception (CP) requires substantial communication bandwidth to exchange sensing information among connected agents. A variety of compression techniques have been proposed to reduce transmission costs while retaining task-relevant information. However, most existing methods follow a frame-wise compression paradigm, overlooking temporal predictability and repeatedly transmitting information that could be inferred from historical context. To address these limitations, we propose MirrorComm, the first world model-based communication-efficient CP framework. Specifically, mirrored world models at the transmitter and receiver predict the transmitter's current observation from a shared history of its reconstructed observations. The transmitter compares this prediction with its current observation and selectively transmits observation updates to correct prediction errors, reducing repeated transmission of predictable information. Experiments on the OPV2V dataset across two downstream tasks including object detection and semantic segmentation show that MirrorComm reduces communication bandwidth requirements by up to approximately 66-fold while maintaining comparable performance to a state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the individual components.