# Deformation-Free Cross-Domain Image Registration via Position-Encoded Temporal Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15959/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [A Deep Learning Framework for Unsupervised Affine and Deformable Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06130/) (2018)
- [Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Image Registration with Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16148/) (2020)
- [A survey on deep learning in medical image registration: new technologies, uncertainty, evaluation metrics, and beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15615/) (2023)
- [Alternative Telescopic Displacement: An Efficient Multimodal Alignment Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16950/) (2023)
- [Zoom and Shift are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08866/) (2024)
- [DUAL: Dynamic Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03158/) (2025)
- [Learning Domain-Invariant Representations for Cross-Domain Image Registration via Scene-Appearance Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08875/) (2026)
- [DCER: Dual-Stage Compression and Energy-Based Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04904/) (2026)
- [Bio-Inspired Mamba: Temporal Locality and Bioplausible Learning in Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11263/) (2024)
- [Ancestral Mamba: Enhancing Selective Discriminant Space Model with Online Visual Prototype Learning for Efficient and Robust Discriminant Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22729/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of cross-domain image registration, where paired images exhibit coupled geometric misalignment and domain-specific appearance shift. We formalize this as a factorization problem: decomposing each image into a domain-invariant scene representation and a global appearance statistic, such that registration reduces to recombining the scene structure of the moving image with the appearance of the fixed image via Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN). This factorization eliminates the need for explicit deformation field estimation. To exploit temporal coherence in sequential acquisitions, we introduce a position-encoded cross-frame attention mechanism that fuses learnable and sinusoidal position embeddings with multi-head attention over a sliding window of neighboring frames, enriching the scene representation with inter-frame context. We instantiate this framework as GPEReg-Net and evaluate on two benchmarks: FIRE-Reg-256 (retinal fundus, semi-rigid) and HPatches-Reg-256 (synthetic textured patches, affine). GPEReg-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmarks (FIRE: SSIM = 0.928, PSNR = 33.47 dB; HPatches: SSIM = 0.450, PSNR = 21.01 dB), surpassing all baselines, including deformation-based methods, while running 1.87x faster than SAS-Net. Code: https://github.com/JiahaoQin/GPEReg-Net.