Determine the origin of shared redundancy in the VGGT family

Determine the origin of the shared two-region layer-redundancy pattern in the VGGT family by distinguishing the effects of shared architecture design, multi-view geometric objectives, pretrained visual features, and optimization dynamics, ideally by tracking redundancy throughout training.

Background

The paper identifies a broad early redundancy region and a narrower late redundancy region that recur across VGGT, π³, and VGGT-Ω, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Although this empirical structure supports layer pruning and post-pruning recovery, the mechanisms producing it are not established.

The authors explicitly identify the origin of this shared pattern as unresolved and suggest examining architectural design, multi-view objectives, pretrained visual features, and optimization dynamics, including how redundancy evolves during training. Resolving this issue could inform adaptive depth allocation and the training of shallower models rather than limiting redundancy analysis to post-training compression.