Do Pretrained Backbones Transfer to Physical Sensors? A Systematic Study of Multimodal Initialization Across the Sensor Stack

Abstract

Transfer learning from pretrained backbones has become standard practice in multi-sensor computer vision—yet two questions remain open: which pretrained weights transfer best to multi-sensor setups, and can in-domain pretraining outperform off-the-shelf solutions? Frameworks like MultiMAE demonstrate the utility of masked autoencoding in a multi-modal context, but rely entirely on dense, model-derived modalities. It is unclear how robustly these methods translate to real-world applications that use physical sensors, where the aggregation of diverse public datasets for large-scale pretraining inherently introduces modality sparsity. To investigate this systematically, we curate a multi-sensor autonomous driving collection of $2.82M$ images from 16 publicly available datasets, incorporating both physical hardware modalities (RGB, LWIR, NIR, Event) and model-derived modalities (Stereo Depth, Segmentation). We use this collection for in-domain pretraining based on the MultiMAE approach. We adapt MultiMAE's loss formulation to accommodate sparse samples, and study the effect of an enforced encoder bottleneck for modality alignment and of additional losses specific to dense reconstruction (SSIM and FFT). We then systematically compare against common pretrained backbones (ViT, MAE, DINO and MultiMAE) across downstream sensor fusion tasks. We find that MultiMAE is a surprisingly strong out-of-the-box baseline, transferring effectively even to modalities it has never seen, while our targeted modifications yield incremental but consistent improvements on multi-sensor transfer and overall robustness.