Scalable and Generalizable Correspondence Pruning via Geometry-Consistent Pre-Training

Two-view correspondence pruning aims to identify reliable correspondences for camera pose estimation, serving as a fundamental step in many 3D vision tasks. Existing methods rely on geometric consistency to seek true correspondences (inliers) from numerous false correspondences (outliers). In this learning paradigm, outliers severely affect the representation learning of inliers, resulting in models that are neither robust nor generalizable. To address this issue, we propose a geometry-consistent pre-training paradigm that sculpts scalable and generalizable representations free from outlier interference. The paradigm features two appealing properties. 1) Implementation of geometry-consistent pre-training. We introduce masked inlier reconstruction as a pretext task and develop a simple yet effective pre-training framework based on a masked autoencoder. Specifically, due to the irregular and unordered nature of correspondences, which lack explicit positional information, we adopt a dual-branch structure that separately reconstructs the keypoints of two images. This enables indirect reconstruction of 4D correspondences, where keypoints from the paired image provide positional prompts. 2) Unified correspondence encoder. We propose a simple dual-stream encoder with built-in consensus interaction, providing a unified, extensible architecture that enhances representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, GeneralPruner, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of robustness and generalization across various downstream tasks. Specifically, our method achieves 10.76%, 11.84%, and 8.65% performance gains in camera pose estimation, visual localization, and 3D registration, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to introduce a pre-training framework tailored for correspondence pruning, offering a more universal and scalable solution.