Beyond Spatio-Temporal Priors: A Generalizable Approach for Dense Correspondence Matching

🤗 Upvotes: 24 | cs.CV, cs.LG

Authors:
Luping Liu, Bingyi Kang, Yifan Wang, Dong Xu

Title:
Beyond Spatio-Temporal Priors: A Generalizable Approach for Dense Correspondence Matching

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12421v1

Abstract:
Dense correspondence matching has historically been bounded by simplifying spatio-temporal priors, such as smooth motion and rigid geometry. While effective for classical tasks, these assumptions break down in image editing and reference-guided generation (IEG), where transformations can preserve visual identity while breaking physical continuity. To establish identity-preserving correspondence across such transformations, we introduce FreeMatching, a generalizable framework combining generative and semantic foundation representations with heterogeneous supervision from classical datasets, tracked videos, and synthetic scenes. Teacher-guided iterative refinement further improves correspondence in IEG without dense correspondence annotations. Experimentally, a single FreeMatching model substantially improves correspondence quality on challenging IEG image pairs while retaining competitive performance on classical benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate its utility as a quantitative metric for evaluating identity preservation, with scores that correlate with human judgment. The code is available at https://github.com/luping-liu/FreeMatching.