Broader Impacts NaViT enables training of vision transformers on variable size inputs, which has a profound impact on advancing adaptive computation research. By training models to handle various input size, we can explore adaptive computation techniques that dynamically adjust the computational resources based on the specific requirements of a given input. This flexibility opens up new avenues for implementing ideas that aim at adjusting allocation of compute and improving efficiency in vision tasks per input. Furthermore, NaViT computational efficiency unlocks the potential for scaling up pre-training of vision models. With the ability to handle different resolutions, models can effectively tackle more complex and diverse visual data, allowing for the development of larger and more powerful vision models.

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged.

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged.

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged. However, models such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) offer flexible sequence-based modeling, and hence varying input sequence lengths. We take advantage of this with NaViT (Native Resolution ViT) which uses sequence packing during training to process inputs of arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. Alongside flexible model usage, we demonstrate improved training efficiency for large-scale supervised and contrastive image-text pretraining. NaViT can be efficiently transferred to standard tasks such as image and video classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and leads to improved results on robustness and fairness benchmarks. At inference time, the input resolution flexibility can be used to smoothly navigate the test-time cost-performance trade-off. We believe that NaViT marks a departure from the standard, CNN-designed, input and modelling pipeline used by most computer vision models, and represents a promising direction for ViTs.