cs.CVMar 18, 2026

STAC: Plug-and-Play Spatio-Temporal Aware Cache Compression for Streaming 3D Reconstruction

Authors: Runze Wang, Yuxuan Song, Youcheng Cai, Ligang Liu

Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China

Abstract

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

Appendix figures & tables9 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Feb 25, 2026

XStreamVGGT: Extremely Memory-Efficient Streaming Vision Geometry Grounded Transformer with KV Cache Compression

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×\times and accelerating inference by 5.48×\times, enabling practical and scalable streaming 3D applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ywh187/XStreamVGGT/.
May 10, 2026

Attention Itself Could Retrieve.RetrieveVGGT: Training-Free Long Context Streaming 3D Reconstruction via Query-Key Similarity Retrieval

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.
Apr 16, 2026

StreamCacheVGGT: Streaming Visual Geometry Transformers with Robust Scoring and Hybrid Cache Compression

Reconstructing dense 3D geometry from continuous video streams requires stable inference under a constant memory budget. Existing O(1)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.