# CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10408 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/

## Key facts

- Cited by 166 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 81 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 166)

- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [MapAnything: Universal Feed-Forward Metric 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13414/) (2025)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [No Pose, No Problem: Surprisingly Simple 3D Gaussian Splats from Sparse Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24207/) (2024)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/) (2024)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [MUSt3R: Multi-view Network for Stereo 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01661/) (2025)
- [TTT3R: 3D Reconstruction as Test-Time Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26645/) (2025)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [Reloc3r: Large-Scale Training of Relative Camera Pose Regression for Generalizable, Fast, and Accurate Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08376/) (2024)
- [STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10893/) (2025)
- [Pow3R: Empowering Unconstrained 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17316/) (2025)
- [IGEV++: Iterative Multi-range Geometry Encoding Volumes for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00638/) (2024)
- [MemFlow: Optical Flow Estimation and Prediction with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04808/) (2024)
- [MoCha-Stereo: Motif Channel Attention Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06842/) (2024)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Light3R-SfM: Towards Feed-forward Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14914/) (2025)
- [LONG3R: Long Sequence Streaming 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18255/) (2025)
- [SelfSplat: Pose-Free and 3D Prior-Free Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17190/) (2024)
- [Matrix3D: Large Photogrammetry Model All-in-One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07685/) (2025)
- [Human3R: Everyone Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06219/) (2025)
- [UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09278/) (2025)
- [WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21526/) (2025)
- [OpenStereo: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Stereo Matching and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00343/) (2023)
- [Cross-View Completion Models are Zero-shot Correspondence Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09072/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite impressive performance for high-level downstream tasks, self-supervised pre-training methods have not yet fully delivered on dense geometric vision tasks such as stereo matching or optical flow. The application of self-supervised concepts, such as instance discrimination or masked image modeling, to geometric tasks is an active area of research. In this work, we build on the recent cross-view completion framework, a variation of masked image modeling that leverages a second view from the same scene which makes it well suited for binocular downstream tasks. The applicability of this concept has so far been limited in at least two ways: (a) by the difficulty of collecting real-world image pairs -- in practice only synthetic data have been used -- and (b) by the lack of generalization of vanilla transformers to dense downstream tasks for which relative position is more meaningful than absolute position. We explore three avenues of improvement. First, we introduce a method to collect suitable real-world image pairs at large scale. Second, we experiment with relative positional embeddings and show that they enable vision transformers to perform substantially better. Third, we scale up vision transformer based cross-completion architectures, which is made possible by the use of large amounts of data. With these improvements, we show for the first time that state-of-the-art results on stereo matching and optical flow can be reached without using any classical task-specific techniques like correlation volume, iterative estimation, image warping or multi-scale reasoning, thus paving the way towards universal vision models.
