# GAFlow: Incorporating Gaussian Attention into Optical Flow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16217/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [Neighborhood Attention Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07143/) (2022)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [cosFormer: Rethinking Softmax in Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08791/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07678/) (2019)
- [Playing for Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07322/) (2017)
- [Iterative Residual Refinement for Joint Optical Flow and Occlusion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05290/) (2019)
- [Learning by Analogy: Reliable Supervision from Transformations for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13045/) (2020)
- [MaskFlownet: Asymmetric Feature Matching with Learnable Occlusion Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10955/) (2020)
- [AutoFlow: Learning a Better Training Set for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14544/) (2021)
- [Back to Basics: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow via Brightness Constancy and Motion Smoothness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05842/) (2016)
- [CRAFT: Cross-Attentional Flow Transformer for Robust Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16896/) (2022)
- [A Lightweight Optical Flow CNN - Revisiting Data Fidelity and Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07414/) (2019)
- [Global Matching with Overlapping Attention for Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11335/) (2022)
- [Deep Equilibrium Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08442/) (2022)
- [SKFlow: Learning Optical Flow with Super Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14623/) (2022)
- [High-Resolution Optical Flow from 1D Attention and Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13918/) (2021)
- [Learning Optical Flow from a Few Matches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02166/) (2021)
- [Displacement-Invariant Matching Cost Learning for Accurate Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14851/) (2020)
- [UPFlow: Upsampling Pyramid for Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00212/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/) (2024)
- [WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21526/) (2025)
- [DPFlow: Adaptive Optical Flow Estimation with a Dual-Pyramid Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14880/) (2025)
- [FocusDiffuser: Perceiving Local Disparities for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13133/) (2024)
- [StreamFlow: Streamlined Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation for Video Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17099/) (2023)
- [Memory-Efficient Optical Flow via Radius-Distribution Orthogonal Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03790/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Cost Volume for Memory-Efficient Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04243/) (2024)
- [Adverse Weather Optical Flow: Cumulative Homogeneous-Heterogeneous Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17001/) (2024)
- [FlowTrack: Point-level Flow Network for 3D Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01959/) (2024)
- [Towards Dependable Optical Flow: Benchmarks for Real-World Spatiotemporal Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14865/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Instructed Structure Injection for Generalizable HD Map Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23109/) (2025)
- [Density Adaptive Attention is All You Need: Robust Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Across Multiple Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11143/) (2024)
- [MambaFlow: A Mamba-Centric Architecture for End-to-End Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07046/) (2025)
- [Efficient All-Pairs Correlation Volume Sampling for Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16942/) (2025)
- [DMAligner: Enhancing Image Alignment via Diffusion Model Based View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23022/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Object Priors for Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05786/) (2024)
- [CompactFlowNet: Efficient Real-time Optical Flow Estimation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13273/) (2024)
- [FlowPainter: Inpainting Optical Flow via Confidence-Guided Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10140/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical flow, or the estimation of motion fields from image sequences, is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. Unlike most pixel-wise tasks that aim at achieving consistent representations of the same category, optical flow raises extra demands for obtaining local discrimination and smoothness, which yet is not fully explored by existing approaches. In this paper, we push Gaussian Attention (GA) into the optical flow models to accentuate local properties during representation learning and enforce the motion affinity during matching. Specifically, we introduce a novel Gaussian-Constrained Layer (GCL) which can be easily plugged into existing Transformer blocks to highlight the local neighborhood that contains fine-grained structural information. Moreover, for reliable motion analysis, we provide a new Gaussian-Guided Attention Module (GGAM) which not only inherits properties from Gaussian distribution to instinctively revolve around the neighbor fields of each point but also is empowered to put the emphasis on contextually related regions during matching. Our fully-equipped model, namely Gaussian Attention Flow network (GAFlow), naturally incorporates a series of novel Gaussian-based modules into the conventional optical flow framework for reliable motion analysis. Extensive experiments on standard optical flow datasets consistently demonstrate the exceptional performance of the proposed approach in terms of both generalization ability evaluation and online benchmark testing. Code is available at https://github.com/LA30/GAFlow.