VGGT-Prime: Compute-Adaptive Mixture-of-Heads for Efficient Visual Geometry Transformers

Abteen Arab, Guile Wu, Chengjie Huang, Dongfeng Bai

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 \emph{token redundancy} through token merging or key/value sparsification. Our work resolves this bottleneck from a different perspective by investigating \emph{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…