# SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 174 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [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)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [YouTube-VOS: A Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03327/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [ASpanFormer: Detector-Free Image Matching with Adaptive Span Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14201/) (2022)
- [Playing for Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07322/) (2017)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [CroCo: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Vision Tasks by Cross-View Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10716/) (2022)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [Quadratic video interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00627/) (2019)
- [Human Pose Regression with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11291/) (2021)
- [MaskFlownet: Asymmetric Feature Matching with Learnable Occlusion Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10955/) (2020)
- [Deep Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02884/) (2019)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01923/) (2023)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [Deep Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01639/) (2019)
- [Flow-edge Guided Video Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01835/) (2020)
- [Models Matter, So Does Training: An Empirical Study of CNNs for Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05571/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 174)

- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [WorldScore: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for World Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00983/) (2025)
- [Easi3R: Estimating Disentangled Motion from DUSt3R Without Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24391/) (2025)
- [Stereo4D: Learning How Things Move in 3D from Internet Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09621/) (2024)
- [Towards Practical Real-Time Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20762/) (2025)
- [DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/) (2024)
- [AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07310/) (2025)
- [WildGS-SLAM: Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03886/) (2025)
- [UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09278/) (2025)
- [Any4D: Unified Feed-Forward Metric 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10935/) (2025)
- [WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21526/) (2025)
- [Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13802/) (2025)
- [OMNI-DC: Highly Robust Depth Completion with Multiresolution Depth Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19278/) (2024)
- [Cross-View Completion Models are Zero-shot Correspondence Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09072/) (2024)
- [DPFlow: Adaptive Optical Flow Estimation with a Dual-Pyramid Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14880/) (2025)
- [Advances in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction and View Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14501/) (2025)
- [WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21686/) (2026)
- [POMATO: Marrying Pointmap Matching with Temporal Motion for Dynamic 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05692/) (2025)
- [VideoGen-Eval: Agent-based System for Video Generation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23452/) (2025)
- [DrivingGen: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Generative Video World Models in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01528/) (2026)
- [SplatFlow: Self-Supervised Dynamic Gaussian Splatting in Neural Motion Flow Field for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15482/) (2024)
- [Vista4D: Video Reshooting with 4D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21915/) (2026)
- [WorldWeaver: Generating Long-Horizon Video Worlds via Rich Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15720/) (2025)
- [Motion 3-to-4: 3D Motion Reconstruction for 4D Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14253/) (2026)
- [Dynamics-Aware Gaussian Splatting Streaming Towards Fast On-the-Fly 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14847/) (2024)
- [CoWTracker: Tracking by Warping instead of Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04877/) (2026)
- [FramePainter: Endowing Interactive Image Editing with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08225/) (2025)
- [3D Scene Prompting for Scene-Consistent Camera-Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14945/) (2025)
- [Track4World: Feedforward World-centric Dense 3D Tracking of All Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02573/) (2026)
- [Can Video Diffusion Model Reconstruct 4D Geometry?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21082/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce SEA-RAFT, a more simple, efficient, and accurate RAFT for optical flow. Compared with RAFT, SEA-RAFT is trained with a new loss (mixture of Laplace). It directly regresses an initial flow for faster convergence in iterative refinements and introduces rigid-motion pre-training to improve generalization. SEA-RAFT achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the Spring benchmark with a 3.69 endpoint-error (EPE) and a 0.36 1-pixel outlier rate (1px), representing 22.9% and 17.8% error reduction from best published results. In addition, SEA-RAFT obtains the best cross-dataset generalization on KITTI and Spring. With its high efficiency, SEA-RAFT operates at least 2.3x faster than existing methods while maintaining competitive performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SEA-RAFT.