GPA-VGGT: Geometry-Preserving Acceleration of VGGT

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) recovers dense 3D scene structure from multi-view images in one forward pass, but quadratic cross-frame attention limits its scalability. Existing training-free accelerators reduce computation uniformly along one axis, missing layer heterogeneity. Our spectral, probing, and causal analyses reveal three regimes: shallow layers lack cross-view structure, middle layers drive cross-view alignment, and deep layers are redundant for dense geometry yet their cross-frame attention remains essential for pose. RegimeVGGT applies layer-wise U-shaped compression along two axes: Saliency-Guided Banded Merging protects geometry- and edge-salient tokens, while Selectively Protected K/V Downsampling preserves cross-frame spatial coverage and the pose-critical path through a phase-shifted spatial grid, a reference-frame anchor, and uncompressed camera/register tokens. Training-free, RegimeVGGT achieves a 6.7x speedup over VGGT* at matched reconstruction quality.

Feed-forward visual geometry models such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) have recently enabled direct 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. Despite their promising performance, these models scale quadratically with the number of input views due to their global attention mechanism, resulting in substantial latency for long sequence inputs. There have been some recent efforts to accelerate VGGT, but they primarily focus on reducing token redundancy through token merging or key/value sparsification. Our work resolves this bottleneck from a different perspective by investigating architectural redundancy in visual geometry transformers. We show that the multi-head attention modules in VGGT's global-attention layers contain substantial architectural redundancy, with only a subset of heads carrying critical geometric information. In light of this observation, we propose VGGT-Prime, a compute-adaptive mixture-of-heads model that resolves this redundancy to accelerate visual geometry transformers while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. The key idea of VGGT-Prime is to estimate the appropriate computation level for each global-attention head using a lightweight router and then dynamically assign each head to different computation modes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that VGGT-Prime can achieve an {$8\times$} inference speedup over VGGT while maintaining competitive performance on camera pose, depth, and point-cloud predictions. We further show that VGGT-Prime is complementary to existing acceleration methods, such as token merging, further improving inference speed by up to $14{\times}$ over VGGT. An overview of our work is available on our project page.

Feed-forward visual geometry models, exemplified by VGGT, have demonstrated strong multi-view reconstruction capabilities through dense global attention. However, the resulting all-to-all cross-view computation scales quadratically with the number of input views, making long-sequence inference particularly expensive due to substantial frame-level redundancy among highly overlapping observations. We uncover a topology-first, geometry-later evolution in VGGT camera tokens: shallow-layer tokens reliably capture local view neighborhoods, whereas deeper-layer tokens progressively encode globally organized inter-view geometry. Motivated by this observation, we introduce BlazeVGGT, a training-free framework for structure-aware frame-level key--value sparsification. At each global-attention block, BlazeVGGT constructs a view-level similarity kernel from camera-token relations and employs greedy determinantal point process inference to select a compact set of mutually complementary views. The selected views constitute the key--value context, while all input frames are retained as queries. This asymmetric attention design preserves dense per-frame predictions while eliminating redundant cross-view computation, allowing our method to be directly integrated into pretrained VGGT as a plug-and-play module without parameter updates. Its advantages become increasingly pronounced with sequence length: at 2,000 frames, BlazeVGGT achieves approximately 13$\times$ faster inference than VGGT while reducing the Chamfer Distance from 0.41 to 0.32. Extensive experiments demonstrate a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off in point-cloud reconstruction and camera-pose estimation, compatibility with existing VGGT accelerators such as FastVGGT and LiteVGGT, and transferability to VGGT-based models including StreamVGGT and PAGE-4D. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/MagiciannnY/BlazeVGGT.git.