# Self-Supervised Spatial Correspondence Across Modalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Space-Time Correspondence as a Contrastive Random Walk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14613/) (2020)
- [Kornia: an Open Source Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02190/) (2019)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [Neighbourhood Consensus Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10510/) (2018)
- [DF-Net: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Depth and Flow using Cross-Task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01649/) (2018)
- [What Matters in Unsupervised Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04902/) (2020)
- [Learning by Analogy: Reliable Supervision from Transformations for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13045/) (2020)
- [MAST: A Memory-Augmented Self-supervised Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07793/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Deep Learning Reforms Image Matching: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04619/) (2025)
- [Cranio-ID: Graph-Based Craniofacial Identification via Automatic Landmark Annotation in 2D Multi-View X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14411/) (2025)
- [TartanMatch: Towards Universal Dense Correspondence Across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14513/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a method for finding cross-modal space-time correspondences. Given two images from different visual modalities, such as an RGB image and a depth map, our model identifies which pairs of pixels correspond to the same physical points in the scene. To solve this problem, we extend the contrastive random walk framework to simultaneously learn cycle-consistent feature representations for both cross-modal and intra-modal matching. The resulting model is simple and has no explicit photo-consistency assumptions. It can be trained entirely using unlabeled data, without the need for any spatially aligned multimodal image pairs. We evaluate our method on both geometric and semantic correspondence tasks. For geometric matching, we consider challenging tasks such as RGB-to-depth and RGB-to-thermal matching (and vice versa); for semantic matching, we evaluate on photo-sketch and cross-style image alignment. Our method achieves strong performance across all benchmarks.
