# Unlocking the Power of Critical Factors for 3D Visual Geometry Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21713/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (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)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12013/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Feed-forward visual geometry estimation has recently made rapid progress. However, an important gap remains: multi-frame models usually produce better cross-frame consistency, yet they often underperform strong per-frame methods on single-frame accuracy. This observation motivates our systematic investigation into the critical factors driving model performance through rigorous ablation studies, which reveals several key insights: 1) Scaling up data diversity and quality unlocks further performance gains even in state-of-the-art visual geometry estimation methods; 2) Commonly adopted confidence-aware loss and gradient-based loss mechanisms may unintentionally hinder performance; 3) Joint supervision through both per-sequence and per-frame alignment improves results, while local region alignment surprisingly degrades performance. Furthermore, we introduce two enhancements to integrate the advantages of optimization-based methods and high-resolution inputs: a consistency loss function that enforces alignment between depth maps, camera parameters, and point maps, and an efficient architectural design that leverages high-resolution information. We integrate these designs into CARVE, a resolution-enhanced model for feed-forward visual geometry estimation. Experiments on point cloud reconstruction, video depth estimation, and camera pose/intrinsic estimation show that CARVE achieves strong and robust performance across diverse benchmarks.