Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion
Authors: name: Luming Tang, name: Menglin Jia, name: Qianqian Wang, name: Cheng Perng Phoo, name: Bharath Hariharan

Finding correspondences between images is a fundamental problem in computer
vision. In this paper, we show that correspondence emerges in image diffusion
models without any explicit supervision. We propose a simple strategy to
extract this implicit knowledge out of diffusion networks as image features,
namely DIffusion FeaTures (DIFT), and use them to establish correspondences
between real images. Without any additional fine-tuning or supervision on the
task-specific data or annotations, DIFT is able to outperform both
weakly-supervised methods and competitive off-the-shelf features in identifying
semantic, geometric, and temporal correspondences. Particularly for semantic
correspondence, DIFT from Stable Diffusion is able to outperform DINO and
OpenCLIP by 19 and 14 accuracy points respectively on the challenging SPair-71k
benchmark. It even outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised methods on 9 out
of 18 categories while remaining on par for the overall performance. Project
page: https://diffusionfeatures.github.io