English

MegaFlow: Zero-Shot Large Displacement Optical Flow

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-27 v1

Abstract

Accurate estimation of large displacement optical flow remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically rely on iterative local search or/and domain-specific fine-tuning, which severely limits their performance in large displacement and zero-shot generalization scenarios. To overcome this, we introduce MegaFlow, a simple yet powerful model for zero-shot large displacement optical flow. Rather than relying on highly complex, task-specific architectural designs, MegaFlow adapts powerful pre-trained vision priors to produce temporally consistent motion fields. In particular, we formulate flow estimation as a global matching problem by leveraging pre-trained global Vision Transformer features, which naturally capture large displacements. This is followed by a few lightweight iterative refinements to further improve the sub-pixel accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MegaFlow achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across multiple optical flow benchmarks. Moreover, our model also delivers highly competitive zero-shot performance on long-range point tracking benchmarks, demonstrating its robust transferability and suggesting a unified paradigm for generalizable motion estimation. Our project page is at: https://kristen-z.github.io/projects/megaflow.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.25739,
  title  = {MegaFlow: Zero-Shot Large Displacement Optical Flow},
  author = {Dingxi Zhang and Fangjinhua Wang and Marc Pollefeys and Haofei Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25739},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project Page: https://kristen-z.github.io/projects/megaflow Code: https://github.com/cvg/megaflow

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:39:41.656Z