ICLR 2026 Orals

WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow

Yihan Wang, Jia Deng

Vision & 3D Sat, Apr 25 · 10:42 AM–10:52 AM · 204 A/B Avg rating: 6.67 (6–8)

Abstract

We introduce Warping-Alone Field Transforms (WAFT), a simple and effective method for optical flow. WAFT is similar to RAFT but replaces cost volume with high-resolution warping, achieving better accuracy with lower memory cost. This design challenges the conventional wisdom that constructing cost volumes is necessary for strong performance. WAFT is a simple and flexible meta-architecture with minimal inductive biases and reliance on custom designs. Compared with existing methods, WAFT ranks 1st on Spring, Sintel, and KITTI benchmarks, achieves the best zero-shot generalization on KITTI, while being 1.3-4.1x faster than existing methods that have competitive accuracy (e.g., 1.3x than Flowformer++, 4.1x than CCMR+). Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/WAFT.

One-sentence summary·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)

WAFT replaces cost volumes with high-resolution warping for optical flow, ranking first on Spring, Sintel, and KITTI with 1.3-4.1x faster inference.

Contributions·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)
  • Proposes simple and flexible WAFT meta-architecture replacing cost volumes with high-resolution warping
  • Achieves state-of-the-art results on Spring, Sintel, and KITTI benchmarks with best zero-shot generalization
  • Demonstrates significantly faster inference speed than existing competitive methods
Methods used·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)
  • High-resolution warping
  • Iterative updates
  • Feature-space warping
Datasets used·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)
  • Spring
  • Sintel
  • KITTI
Limitations (author-stated)·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)

Authors did not state explicit limitations.

Future work (author-stated)·Auto-generated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001(?)

Authors did not state explicit future directions.

Author keywords

  • Optical Flow; Computer Vision; Warping; Dense Correspondences

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