REOrdering Patches Improves Vision Models
Authors: name: Declan Kutscher, name: David M. Chan, name: Yutong Bai, name: Trevor Darrell, name: Ritwik Gupta

Sequence models such as transformers require inputs to be represented as
one-dimensional sequences. In vision, this typically involves flattening images
using a fixed row-major (raster-scan) order. While full self-attention is
permutation-equivariant, modern long-sequence transformers increasingly rely on
architectural approximations that break this invariance and introduce
sensitivity to patch ordering. We show that patch order significantly affects
model performance in such settings, with simple alternatives like column-major
or Hilbert curves yielding notable accuracy shifts. Motivated by this, we
propose REOrder, a two-stage framework for discovering task-optimal patch
orderings. First, we derive an information-theoretic prior by evaluating the
compressibility of various patch sequences. Then, we learn a policy over
permutations by optimizing a Plackett-Luce policy using REINFORCE. This
approach enables efficient learning in a combinatorial permutation space.
REOrder improves top-1 accuracy over row-major ordering on ImageNet-1K by up to
3.01% and Functional Map of the World by 13.35%.