# Learnable Graph Matching: A Practical Paradigm for Data Association

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [CVXPY: A Python-Embedded Modeling Language for Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00943/) (2016)
- [OptNet: Differentiable Optimization as a Layer in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00443/) (2017)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [3DMatch: Learning Local Geometric Descriptors from RGB-D Reconstructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08182/) (2016)
- [DeeperGCN: All You Need to Train Deeper GCNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07739/) (2020)
- [Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06664/) (2020)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07515/) (2019)
- [PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02669/) (2018)
- [Learning to Find Good Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05971/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Online Navigation Refinement: Achieving Lane-Level Guidance by Associating Standard-Definition and Online Perception Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07487/) (2025)
- [UniVAD v2: Unified Visual Anomaly Detection via Support-Conditioned Boundary Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29714/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data association is at the core of many computer vision tasks, e.g., multiple object tracking, image matching, and point cloud registration. however, current data association solutions have some defects: they mostly ignore the intra-view context information; besides, they either train deep association models in an end-to-end way and hardly utilize the advantage of optimization-based assignment methods, or only use an off-the-shelf neural network to extract features. In this paper, we propose a general learnable graph matching method to address these issues. Especially, we model the intra-view relationships as an undirected graph. Then data association turns into a general graph matching problem between graphs. Furthermore, to make optimization end-to-end differentiable, we relax the original graph matching problem into continuous quadratic programming and then incorporate training into a deep graph neural network with KKT conditions and implicit function theorem. In MOT task, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several MOT datasets. For image matching, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a popular indoor dataset, ScanNet. For point cloud registration, we also achieve competitive results. Code will be available at https://github.com/jiaweihe1996/GMTracker.