SoM-MTM: Synesthesia of Machines (SoM)-Driven Masked Token Model for Cooperative Perception over Packet Loss Channel

To support the large-scale and heterogeneous visual cooperative perception (CP) demands in next-generation mobile networks, intelligent and efficient sensory data transmission is a critical challenge. Under the emerging convergence of communication networks and agentic artificial intelligence (AI), existing research emphasizes utilizing end-to-end neural networks to simplify communication modules, which has shown promising potential for CP. However, these studies are still limited to specific channel models, cooperation modes, and perception tasks, failing to fully leverage powerful visual processing approaches to enhance universality. To address this, we propose a Synesthesia of Machines (SoM)-driven Masked Token Model, referred to as SoM-MTM, as a plug-and-play paradigm for generic visual CP. Inspired by masked image modeling methods such as MAE, it possesses great perceptual context learning capabilities to recover distorted features over packet loss channels, thereby improving information carrying efficiency. Building upon Swin Transformer, SoM-MTM further embeds prior masked information through an External Routing MoE mechanism, maximally repairing and enhancing environmental perception features during cooperation. Comprehensive experimental results confirm that SoM-MTM can consistently enhance perception performances on various tasks, especially strong generalization to unseen scenarios, while maintaining favorable model cost and scalability.