Weather-Conditioned Branch Routing for Robust LiDAR-Radar 3D Object Detection

arXiv cs.CV / 4/8/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses robust 3D object detection in adverse weather by overcoming limitations of prior LiDAR–4D radar fusion approaches that use fixed or only weakly adaptive modality weighting.

Abstract

Robust 3D object detection in adverse weather is highly challenging due to the varying reliability of different sensors. While existing LiDAR-4D radar fusion methods improve robustness, they predominantly rely on fixed or weakly adaptive pipelines, failing to dy-namically adjust modality preferences as environmental conditions change. To bridge this gap, we reformulate multi-modal perception as a weather-conditioned branch routing problem. Instead of computing a single fused output, our framework explicitly maintains three parallel 3D feature streams: a pure LiDAR branch, a pure 4D radar branch, and a condition-gated fusion branch. Guided by a condition token extracted from visual and semantic prompts, a lightweight router dynamically predicts sample-specific weights to softly aggregate these representations. Furthermore, to prevent branch collapse, we introduce a weather-supervised learning strategy with auxiliary classification and diversity regularization to enforce distinct, condition-dependent routing behaviors. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, it provides explicit and highly interpretable insights into modality preferences, transparently revealing how adaptive routing robustly shifts reliance between LiDAR and 4D radar across diverse adverse-weather scenarios. The source code with be released.