Learning Hierarchical Patch Splitting Policies for Faster Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are bottlenecked by the length of their input token sequence. Standard patchification fixes this length with a single patch size applied across the image, regardless of regional content. Prior work on adaptive patch sizing reduces token count by assigning coarser patches to visually simple regions, but relies on noisy pixel-level heuristics such as local entropy to make patchification decisions. We argue that this compute allocation should be grounded in the model’s own semantic representations, not in raw pixel statistics. We introduce Split Policy Learned Image Tokenization which learns to allocate token resolution based on what the model finds meaningful, producing shorter token sequences that are better matched to task-relevant content. SPLIT matches the accuracy of full-resolution ViT classification baselines while using 30% fewer tokens. The same gains hold dense prediction: SPLIT achieves competitive accuracy on COCO and ADE20K, demonstrating that semantically grounded patchification generalises well beyond classification.