# WAFT-Stereo: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24836 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24836/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [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)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Project Aria: A New Tool for Egocentric Multi-Modal AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13561/) (2023)
- [Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11483/) (2022)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/) (2024)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [DynamicStereo: Consistent Dynamic Depth from Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02296/) (2023)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [Infinigen Indoors: Photorealistic Indoor Scenes using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11824/) (2024)
- [3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05483/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Deep Stereo Matching on High-resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06704/) (2019)
- [HITNet: Hierarchical Iterative Tile Refinement Network for Real-time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12140/) (2020)
- [SMD-Nets: Stereo Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03866/) (2021)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Falling Things: A Synthetic Dataset for 3D Object Detection and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06534/) (2018)

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

- [SpatialBench: Is Your Spatial Foundation Model an All-Round Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27367/) (2026)
- [WAVE-Stereo: Warp-Aligned Volume Encoding for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13674/) (2026)
- [NBS: No Bias Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28933/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce WAFT-Stereo, a simple and effective warping-based method for stereo matching. WAFT-Stereo demonstrates that cost volumes, a common design used in many leading methods, are not necessary for strong performance and can be replaced by warping with improved efficiency. WAFT-Stereo ranks first on ETH3D (BP-0.5), Middlebury (RMSE), and KITTI (all metrics), reducing the zero-shot error by 81% on ETH3D, while being 1.8-6.7x faster than competitive methods. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/WAFT-Stereo.