# LiteVGGT: Boosting Vanilla VGGT via Geometry-aware Cached Token Merging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Token pruning and merging for ViTs, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 49 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Token pruning and merging for ViTs](https://mlsanity.com/inference/token-pruning-and-merging-for-vits/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Wonder3D: Single Image to 3D using Cross-Domain Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15008/) (2023)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [GS-LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19702/) (2024)
- [Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04532/) (2021)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (2018)
- [Token Merging for Fast Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17604/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Feed-Forward 3D Scene Modeling: A Problem-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14025/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Guided Camera Motion Understanding in VideoLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13119/) (2026)
- [Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11683/) (2026)
- [Spark3R: Asymmetric Token Reduction Makes Fast Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06270/) (2026)
- [RegimeVGGT: Layer-Wise Spatially Preserving Redundancy Removal for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18439/) (2026)
- [Diversity-aware View Partitioning for Scalable VGGT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01885/) (2026)
- [SAF3R: Dynamic Sparse Attention for Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03612/) (2026)
- [PrePARE: Pre-AA Token Pruning for Frozen Multi-View Geometry Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08371/) (2026)
- [Not All Tasks Quantize Equally: Fisher-Guided Quantization for Visual Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15828/) (2026)
- [Good Token Hunting: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Token Selection for Visual Geometry Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23892/) (2026)
- [LiAuto-GeoX: Efficient Grounded Driving Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05774/) (2026)
- [G3AR: Graph-Guided Neural Visual Geometry for Scalable Multi-Sequence Aerial Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16603/) (2026)
- [WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30436/) (2026)
- [ReSS: Residual-Restoring Sparse Attention for 3D Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35593/) (2026)
- [OTT3R: Multi-View 3D Reconstruction and Fast Dataset Generation at 1% Compute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36374/) (2026)
- [Does the VGGT Family Need All Its Layers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36842/) (2026)
- [Zebra3D: Efficient Hybrid Foundation Models For Scalable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12727/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D vision foundation models like Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) have advanced greatly in geometric perception. However, it is time-consuming and memory-intensive for long sequences, limiting application to large-scale scenes beyond hundreds of images. To address this, we propose LiteVGGT, achieving up to 10x speedup and substantial memory reduction, enabling efficient processing of 1000-image scenes. We derive two key insights for 3D reconstruction: (1) tokens from local image regions have inherent geometric correlations, leading to high similarity and computational redundancy; (2) token similarity across adjacent network layers remains stable, allowing for reusable merge decisions. Guided by these, we design a simple yet efficient strategy, dubbed geometry-aware cached token merging. We analyze each token's geometric importance, optimizing anchor token selection to better preserve key information for reconstruction. We also cache and reuse merge indices across layers, substantially reducing latency with minimal accuracy impact. This strategy retains VGGT's core performance, enabling efficient fine-tuning and FP8 quantization for further gains. Extensive experiments validate LiteVGGT's effectiveness, scalability, and robustness. Project page: https://garlicba.github.io/LiteVGGT/