# LiteMatch: Lightweight Zero-Shot Stereo Matching via Cost Volume Stabilization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31636 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31636/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2026.

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

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04838/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [GA-Net: Guided Aggregation Net for End-to-end Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06587/) (2019)
- [Group-wise Correlation Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04025/) (2019)
- [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)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [CFNet: Cascade and Fused Cost Volume for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04314/) (2021)
- [HITNet: Hierarchical Iterative Tile Refinement Network for Real-time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12140/) (2020)
- [Curriculum Learning by Transfer Learning: Theory and Experiments with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03796/) (2018)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Computing the Stereo Matching Cost with a Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4326/) (2014)
- [Cascade Residual Learning: A Two-stage Convolutional Neural Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09204/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Unimodal Cost Volume Filtering for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03751/) (2019)
- [DEFOM-Stereo: Depth Foundation Model Based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09466/) (2025)
- [MoCha-Stereo: Motif Channel Attention Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06842/) (2024)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Bi3D: Stereo Depth Estimation via Binary Classifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07274/) (2020)
- [A Study of Gradient Variance in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04532/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Frequency-domain-based Feature Disentanglement and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08029/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Multi-Modal Cross-Entropy Loss for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15612/) (2023)
- [Phaseformer: Phase-based Attention Mechanism for Underwater Image Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01456/) (2024)
- [Learning Robust Stereo Matching in the Wild with Selective Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04631/) (2025)
- [Diving into the Fusion of Monocular Priors for Generalized Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14414/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite rapid progress in learning-based stereo matching, high accuracy is often achieved at the cost of heavy backbones and computationally intensive 3D cost volume processing, resulting in substantial memory and runtime overhead. More critically, these methods frequently struggle to generalize across domains, limiting their practical deployment. We present textitLiteMatch, a lightweight stereo matching framework that achieves strong zero-shot generalization through cost volume stabilization-without expensive 3D convolutions. LiteMatch employs two complementary encoders: a Cross-View Correspondence Encoder (CVCE) to capture global cross-view interactions, and a High-Frequency Encoder (HFE) that enhances fine structural details via FFT-based frequency cues. To stabilize the cost volume, we introduce the textitCost Volume Consistency Loss (CVC-Loss), a voxel-wise binary cross-entropy objective applied to softmax-normalized cost distributions. By encouraging sharp and unimodal disparity probabilities, CVC-Loss promotes stable cost distributions and enables rapid convergence. A lightweight refinement module further produces sharp full-resolution disparities with low-iteration updates, avoiding heavy recurrent refinement. With a flexible design ranging from 3.36M to 9.58M parameters, LiteMatch achieves exceptional zero-shot generalization, delivering competitive EPE and D1 performance across Scene Flow, KITTI, Middlebury, ETH3D, and DrivingStereo. Our results establish that lightweight architectures can indeed generalize across domains without sacrificing accuracy. hrefhttps://mdraqibkhan.github.io/LitematchtextcolorblueCode