TartanMatch: Towards Universal Dense Correspondence Across Modalities

Visual correspondence across image-to-image (2D-2D), image-to-point cloud (2D-3D), and point cloud-to-point cloud (3D-3D) geometric matching forms the foundation for numerous 3D vision tasks. Despite sharing a similar problem structure, current methods use task-specific designs with separate models for each modality combination. We present UniCorrn, the first correspondence model with shared weights that unifies geometric matching across all three tasks. Our key insight is that Transformer attention naturally captures cross-modal feature similarity. We propose a dual-stream decoder that maintains separate appearance and positional feature streams. This design enables end-to-end learning through stack-able layers while supporting flexible query-based correspondence estimation across heterogeneous modalities. Our architecture employs modality-specific backbones followed by shared encoder and decoder components, trained jointly on diverse data combining pseudo point clouds from depth maps with real 3D correspondence annotations. UniCorrn achieves competitive performance on 2D-2D matching and surpasses prior state-of-the-art by 8% on 7Scenes (2D-3D) and 10% on 3DLoMatch (3D-3D) in registration recall. Project website: https://neu-vi.github.io/UniCorrn

Learning reliable correspondences between images and point clouds is fundamental for 2D-3D matching. Despite recent progress in detection-free methods, existing approaches primarily optimize matching within a single model and often struggle to maintain reliable correspondences under challenging conditions such as noisy inputs, low overlap, and ambiguous structures. In this work, we propose TeaMatch, a novel framework that introduces teachability as a criterion for cross-modal representation learning. We define teachability as the ability of a representation to be effectively recovered by weak learners under degraded inputs, reflecting its structural consistency and robustness. To this end, we construct a set of task-specific weak students that simulate common failure modes and train them to imitate the teacher on a training split while evaluating their recoverability on a disjoint meta split. The teacher is then optimized to improve the students' ability to recover reliable correspondences, guided by correspondence-level and geometry-aware constraints. Our framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing coarse-to-fine matching pipelines without additional inference cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TeaMatch improves matching robustness and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging 2D-3D matching benchmarks.

Establishing reliable image correspondences is essential for many robotic vision problems. However, existing methods often struggle in challenging scenarios with large viewpoint changes or textureless regions, where incorrect cor- respondences may still receive high similarity scores. This is mainly because conventional models rely solely on fea- ture similarity, lacking an explicit mechanism to estimate the reliability of predicted matches, leading to overconfident errors. To address this issue, we propose SURE, a Semi- dense Uncertainty-REfined matching framework that jointly predicts correspondences and their confidence by modeling both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Our approach in- troduces a novel evidential head for trustworthy coordinate regression, along with a lightweight spatial fusion module that enhances local feature precision with minimal overhead. We evaluated our method on multiple standard benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art semi-dense matching models in both accuracy and efficiency. our code will be available on https://github.com/LSC-ALAN/SURE.