Scaling Laws in Patchification: An Image Is Worth 50,176 Tokens And More
Authors: name: Feng Wang; name: Yaodong Yu; name: Guoyizhe Wei; name: Wei Shao; name: Yuyin Zhou; name: Alan Yuille; name: Cihang Xie
Published: 2025-02-06 03:01:38

Abstract: Since the introduction of Vision Transformer (ViT), patchification has long
been regarded as a de facto image tokenization approach for plain visual
architectures. By compressing the spatial size of images, this approach can
effectively shorten the token sequence and reduce the computational cost of
ViT-like plain architectures. In this work, we aim to thoroughly examine the
information loss caused by this patchification-based compressive encoding
paradigm and how it affects visual understanding. We conduct extensive patch
size scaling experiments and excitedly observe an intriguing scaling law in
patchification: the models can consistently benefit from decreased patch sizes
and attain improved predictive performance, until it reaches the minimum patch
size of 1x1, i.e., pixel tokenization. This conclusion is broadly applicable
across different vision tasks, various input scales, and diverse architectures
such as ViT and the recent Mamba models. Moreover, as a by-product, we discover
that with smaller patches, task-specific decoder heads become less critical for
dense prediction. In the experiments, we successfully scale up the visual
sequence to an exceptional length of 50,176 tokens, achieving a competitive
test accuracy of 84.6% with a base-sized model on the ImageNet-1k benchmark. We
hope this study can provide insights and theoretical foundations for future
works of building non-compressive vision models. Code is available at
https://github.com/wangf3014/Patch_Scaling.