Abstract As an important and challenging problem in computer vision, learning based optical flow estimation aims to discover the intrinsic correspondence structure between two adjacent video frames through statistical learning. Therefore, a key issue to solve in this area is how to effectively model the multi-scale correspondence structure properties in an adaptive end-to-end learning fashion. Motivated by this observation, we propose an end-to-end multi-scale correspondence structure learning (MSCSL) approach for optical flow estimation. In principle, the proposed MSCSL approach is capable of effectively capturing the multi-scale interimage-correlation correspondence structures within a multi-level feature space from deep learning. Moreover, the proposed MSCSL approach builds a spatial Conv-GRU neural network model to adaptively model the intrinsic dependency relationships among these multi-scale correspondence structures. Finally, the above procedures for correspondence structure learning and multi-scale dependency modeling are implemented in a unified end-toend deep learning framework. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.