Online 3D reconstruction from streaming inputs requires both long-term temporal consistency and efficient memory usage. Although causal variants of VGGT address this challenge through a key-value (KV) cache mechanism, the cache grows linearly with the stream length, creating a major memory bottleneck. Under limited memory budgets, early cache eviction significantly degrades reconstruction quality and temporal consistency. In this work, we observe that attention in causal transformers for 3D reconstruction exhibits intrinsic spatio-temporal sparsity. Based on this insight, we propose STAC, a Spatio-Temporally Aware Cache Compression framework for streaming 3D reconstruction with large causal transformers. STAC consists of three key components: (1) a Working Temporal Token Caching mechanism that preserves long-term informative tokens using decayed cumulative attention scores; (2) a Long-term Spatial Token Caching scheme that compresses spatially redundant tokens into voxel-aligned representations for memory-efficient storage; and (3) a Chunk-based Multi-frame Optimization strategy that jointly processes consecutive frames to improve temporal coherence and GPU efficiency. Extensive experiments show that STAC achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while reducing memory consumption by nearly 10x and accelerating inference by 4x, substantially improving the scalability of real-time 3D reconstruction in streaming settings.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Runtime–memory scaling in streaming 3D reconstruction. Bars show per-frame runtime (ms) and lines show KV cache memory (GB, log scale) as the stream grows. Compared with Causal-VGGT, STAC reduces KV cache growth and stabilizes per-frame runtime as the stream length increases.
Figure 2: Spatio-temporal attention sparsity. Representative attention patterns in the global causal attention map of Causal-VGGT, retaining the top 1024 keys per query for visualization. (a) Spatial attention aligned with camera motion; (b) Persistent focus on first-frame tokens as global references; (c) Temporal anchoring via tokens from semantically stable landmark frames; (d) Long-range attention to camera tokens encoding global context.
Figure 3: Overview of STAC. Our framework reconstructs 3D scenes online using spatio-temporal token caching and chunk-based causal inference. (a) The Causal-VGGT module processes ViT-tokenized frames in each chunk using causal attention over the working temporal cache Mtemp and spatial cache Mspat retrieved from a 3D voxel grid. (b) During inference, Working Temporal Token Caching updates token scores after each KV cache access, retaining high-scoring anchor tokens Manchor while preserving first-frame reference tokens Mrefer and sliding-window tokens Mwindow , and evicting the rest. (c) Long-term Spatial Token Caching routes evicted tokens with 3D coordinates from the Head Decoder to many-to-one aggregation in E or one-to-one merging into G . When G is full, re-merging frees a slot for the incoming merged token, and the updated representations are stored in a 3D voxel grid for future retrieval.
Figure 4: Qualitative results on streaming inputs from the 7-scenes and NRGBD datasets.
Method
Type
NRGBD (stride 5)
7-Scenes (stride 5)
Mem (GB) ↓
FPS ↑
ACC ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
ACC ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
mean
med
mean
med
mean
med
mean
med
mean
med
mean
med
DUST3R-GA [ 42 ]
Optim
0.619
0.384
0.112
0.028
0.504
0.497
0.406
0.266
0.184
0.055
0.523
0.532
–
< 1
MASt3R-GA [ 17 ]
Optim
0.599
0.311
0.306
0.096
0.552
0.570
0.459
0.266
0.187
0.040
0.544
0.568
–
< 1
MonST3R-GA [ 50 ]
Optim
0.528
0.399
0.242
0.098
0.550
0.576
0.328
0.214
0.200
0.031
0.529
0.545
–
< 1
CUT3R [ 41 ]
Online
0.219
0.142
0.098
0.036
0.612
0.686
0.097
0.050
0.042
0.010
0.585
0.632
0.18
19.79
Table 1: Quantitative results for point cloud reconstruction on the NRGBD and 7 Scenes datasets. Integrating STAC into STream3R and StreamVGGT substantially improves memory and runtime efficiency while preserving reconstruction quality. W8 denotes a sliding window size of 8. W22 and W26 indicate larger windows for fair total memory, though our method uses less memory at runtime. Mem: main values report total memory footprint for comparison; for STAC, this includes the spatial token cache storage, while parentheses show its runtime usage. FPS: end-to-end throughput measured over the full reconstruction pipeline, from image input to the final 3D outputs.
Method
Type
Sintel
TUM
ScanNet
ATE ↓
RPE trans ↓
RPE rot ↓
ATE ↓
RPE trans ↓
RPE rot ↓
ATE ↓
RPE trans ↓
RPE rot ↓
DUST3R-GA [ 42 ]
Optim
0.417
0.250
5.796
0.083
0.017
3.567
0.081
0.028
0.784
MASt3R-GA [ 17 ]
Optim
0.185
0.060
1.496
0.038
0.012
0.448
0.078
0.020
0.475
MonST3R-GA [ 50 ]
Optim
0.111
0.044
0.869
0.098
0.019
0.935
0.077
0.018
0.529
CUT3R [ 41 ]
Online
0.213
0.066
0.621
0.046
0.015
0.473
0.099
0.022
0.600
Spann3R [ 38 ]
Online
0.329
0.110
4.471
0.056
0.021
0.591
0.096
0.023
0.661
Table 2: Quantitative camera pose estimation results on the Sintel, TUM Dynamics, and ScanNet datasets.
Method
Acc ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
Mem (GB)
Runtime (ms)
Baseline
0.0776
0.0150
0.6865
0.858
92.56
w/o AC
0.0725
0.0209
0.6991
1.901
61.36
w/o SC
0.0713
0.0199
0.6939
0.572
39.08
w/o CB
0.0666
0.0175
0.6973
2.063
56.08
w/o CO
0.0673
0.0156
0.6948
1.805
138.12
Full
0.0648
0.0142
0.6995
2.210
71.18
Table 3: Ablation study of anchor tokens (AC), spatial token caching (SC), count-based bias (CB), and chunk-based optimization (CO), reporting reconstruction metrics, memory, and backbone runtime (excluding the image encoder and head decoders).
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 5: Visualization of a spatial attention head, where the top 1024 relevant key tokens are retained for each query. The axes are labeled at the frame level to facilitate identification of the corresponding frames.
Figure 6: Intra-voxel similarity distribution vs. cluster count. Distribution of intra-voxel similarity scores across voxels under varying cluster counts n∈{1,2,4,8} . Each score reflects the average cosine similarity of key/value tokens within voxel clusters.
Figure 7: Inter-voxel similarity vs. 3D distance. Mean and samples of InterSim(ua,ub) are shown as a function of Euclidean distance between voxel centers, averaged over sampled voxel pairs across scenes.
Figure 8: Layer-wise intra-voxel similarity in Causal-VGGT. Average intra-voxel similarity scores computed across all attention heads per layer.
Figure 9: Additional qualitative comparisons with baselines.
Method
Type
Sintel
Bonn
KITTI
Abs Rel ↓
δ<1.25↑
Abs Rel ↓
δ<1.25↑
Abs Rel ↓
δ<1.25↑
DUST3R-GA [ 42 ]
Optim
0.656
45.2
0.155
83.3
0.144
81.3
MASt3R-GA [ 17 ]
Optim
0.641
43.9
0.252
70.1
0.183
74.5
MonST3R-GA [ 50 ]
Optim
0.378
55.8
0.067
96.3
0.168
74.4
CUT3R [ 41 ]
Online
0.421
47.9
0.078
93.7
0.118
88.1
Spann3R [ 38 ]
Online
0.622
42.6
0.144
81.3
0.198
73.7
Appendix
Table 4: Comparison of scale-invariant depth estimation results (using per-sequence alignment) on the Sintel [ 5 ] , Bonn [ 22 ] , and KITTI [ 13 ] datasets. We evaluate accuracy (Abs Rel) and consistency ( δ<1.25 ) across different categories of methods. STream3R-W and StreamVGGT-W serve as sliding-window attention baselines, while our STream3R-STAC and StreamVGGT-STAC apply the cache compression strategy under the same runtime memory budget. Methods that rely on global alignment are marked as “GA”. The “Type” column indicates whether the method is optimization-based (“Optim”), streaming (“Online”), or offline (“Offline”).
Figure 10: Behavior of STAC on a long indoor stream from the whiteroom scene of the NRGBD dataset [ 2 ] . Left: backbone inference time per frame with a breakdown of major components. Right: KV-cache memory usage and the number of active voxels (dashed, right axis) over the stream.
r
λ
ACC ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
Mem(GB) ↓
Time(ms) ↓
0.025
0.8
0.064
0.014
0.695
4.861
78.85
0.10
0.8
0.065
0.015
0.698
1.119
73.52
0.05
0.6
0.065
0.015
0.696
1.755
68.78
0.05
0.9
0.064
0.014
0.700
2.251
74.70
0.05
0.8
0.065
0.014
0.700
2.210
71.18
Appendix
Table 5: Effect of voxel resolution r and merging threshold λ on reconstruction quality, memory, and runtime. Experiments are conducted on the NRGBD [ 2 ] dataset using Stream3R [ 16 ] with stride 5. Unless otherwise specified, STAC uses the default setting r=0.05 and λ=0.8 .
Policy
NRGBD
7-Scenes
ACC ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
ACC ↓
Comp ↓
NC ↑
Baseline
0.078
0.015
0.687
0.107
0.035
0.587
Random Selection
0.076
0.021
0.696
0.101
0.039
0.591
Uniform Merging
0.065
0.015
0.699
0.047
0.025
0.606
Ours(STAC)
0.065
0.014
0.700
0.047
0.024
0.606
Appendix
Table 6: Ablation study on 3D reconstruction performance using the NRGBD and 7-Scenes [ 31 ] datasets. Metrics include Accuracy (ACC), Completion (Comp), and Normal Consistency (NC). The baseline uses a sliding-window attention mechanism. “Random Selection” selects tokens without relevance estimation; “Uniform Merging” merges tokens uniformly; and “Ours” applies attention-guided selection and weighted merging.
Streaming 3D reconstruction incrementally builds geometrically consistent scene maps from incoming images or video under tight memory and latency limits.
Learning-based 3D visual geometry models have significantly advanced with the advent of large-scale transformers. Among these, StreamVGGT leverages frame-wise causal attention to deliver robust and efficient streaming 3D reconstruction. However, it suffers from unbounded growth in the Key-Value (KV) cache due to the massive influx of vision tokens from multi-image and long-video inputs, leading to increased memory consumption and inference latency as input frames accumulate. This ultimately limits its scalability for long-horizon applications. To address this gap, we propose XStreamVGGT, a tuning-free approach that seamlessly integrates pruning and quantization to systematically compress the KV cache, enabling extremely memory-efficient streaming inference. Specifically, redundant KVs generated from multi-frame inputs are initially pruned to conform to a fixed KV memory budget using an efficient token-importance identification mechanism that maintains full compatibility with high-performance attention kernels (e.g., FlashAttention). Additionally, leveraging the inherent distribution patterns of KV tensors, we apply dimension-adaptive KV quantization within the pruning pipeline to further minimize memory overhead while preserving numerical accuracy. Extensive evaluations show that XStreamVGGT achieves mostly negligible performance degradation while substantially reducing memory usage by 4.42× and accelerating inference by 5.48×, enabling practical and scalable streaming 3D applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ywh187/XStreamVGGT/.
Zunhai Su, Weihao Ye, Hansen Feng +5
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University · China Star Optoelectronics Technology +2
Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) advances 3D reconstruction via scalable Transformer architecture, but the quadratic complexity of global attention prevents long context application. StreamVGGT enables streaming with causal attention, yet its KV cache grows linearly with frames, causing memory overflow and quality degradation. We present RetrieveVGGT, a training-free framework, which formulates context construction for VGGT as a retrieval problem. By retrieving a fixed number of relevant frames at each step, VGGT maintains a controllable memory budget, which is close to its training context length. Interestingly, we find that the similarity between current frame queries and cached history frame keys at the first global attention layer of VGGT is already a strong indicator of relevance, eliminating the need for additional learned scoring. To enhance information diversity similar to a recommender system, we propose Segment Sampling so that the retrieval spans distinct relevant segments rather than a single high-similarity region. We design a pose-aware spatial memory mechanism that organizes history frames according to their already estimated camera poses, enabling location-aware retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RetrieveVGGT achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming StreamVGGT, TTT3R, and InfiniteVGGT while maintaining constant memory usage regardless of sequence length. Code is available at https://github.com/zzctmd/RetrieveVGGT.
Zichen Zou, Xiaosong Jia, Zuxuan Wu +1
Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI (TEAI), Fudan University · 2Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI
Reconstructing dense 3D geometry from continuous video streams requires stable inference under a constant memory budget. Existing O(1) frameworks primarily rely on a ``pure eviction'' paradigm, which suffers from significant information destruction due to binary token deletion and evaluation noise from localized, single-layer scoring. To address these bottlenecks, we propose StreamCacheVGGT, a training-free framework that reimagines cache management through two synergistic modules: Cross-Layer Consistency-Enhanced Scoring (CLCES) and Hybrid Cache Compression (HCC). CLCES mitigates activation noise by tracking token importance trajectories across the Transformer hierarchy, employing order-statistical analysis to identify sustained geometric salience. Leveraging these robust scores, HCC transcends simple eviction by introducing a three-tier triage strategy that merges moderately important tokens into retained anchors via nearest-neighbor assignment on the key-vector manifold. This approach preserves essential geometric context that would otherwise be lost. Extensive evaluations on five benchmarks (7-Scenes, NRGBD, ETH3D, Bonn, and KITTI) demonstrate that StreamCacheVGGT sets a new state-of-the-art, delivering superior reconstruction accuracy and long-term stability while strictly adhering to constant-cost constraints.
Xuanyi Liu, Chunan Yu, Deyi Ji +6
KOKONI 3D, Moxin Technology · Nanjing University of Science and Technology · University of Science and Technology of China +4