Improving Robotic Manipulation with Efficient Geometry-Aware Vision Encoder

Geometry-grounded vision models, such as VGGT, have emerged as robust visual encoders, providing essential geometric priors for robotic manipulation. However, the high computational cost of these models often leads to slow inference, limiting their practical applications in real-world robotics. This paper introduces eVGGT, a lightweight geometry-aware vision encoder distilled from the high-performing VGGT. Our findings demonstrate two primary advantages: i) integrating eVGGT into imitation learning frameworks (including ACT and Diffusion Policy) yields up to a 6.3% improvement in success rate over standard 2D encoders across bimanual and single-arm tasks in both simulation and real-world settings with variable viewpoints; ii) eVGGT achieves a nearly 5 times speedup and a 63% reduction in memory usage compared to state-of-the-art geometry-aware encoders while maintaining comparable task performance. These results suggest that eVGGT substantially alleviates the performance-latency bottleneck that has limited geometry-aware visuomotor policies in real-world deployment.