The Collapse of Patches

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Guo, Wei, Mao, Shunqi, Liang, Zhuonan, Wang, Heng, Cai, Weidong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911291552038912
author Guo, Wei
Mao, Shunqi
Liang, Zhuonan
Wang, Heng
Cai, Weidong
author_facet Guo, Wei
Mao, Shunqi
Liang, Zhuonan
Wang, Heng
Cai, Weidong
contents Observing certain patches in an image reduces the uncertainty of others. Their realization lowers the distribution entropy of each remaining patch feature, analogous to collapsing a particle's wave function in quantum mechanics. This phenomenon can intuitively be called patch collapse. To identify which patches are most relied on during a target region's collapse, we learn an autoencoder that softly selects a subset of patches to reconstruct each target patch. Graphing these learned dependencies for each patch's PageRank score reveals the optimal patch order to realize an image. We show that respecting this order benefits various masked image modeling methods. First, autoregressive image generation can be boosted by retraining the state-of-the-art model MAR. Next, we introduce a new setup for image classification by exposing Vision Transformers only to high-rank patches in the collapse order. Seeing 22\% of such patches is sufficient to achieve high accuracy. With these experiments, we propose patch collapse as a novel image modeling perspective that promotes vision efficiency. Our project is available at https://github.com/wguo-ai/CoP .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_22281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Collapse of Patches
Guo, Wei
Mao, Shunqi
Liang, Zhuonan
Wang, Heng
Cai, Weidong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Observing certain patches in an image reduces the uncertainty of others. Their realization lowers the distribution entropy of each remaining patch feature, analogous to collapsing a particle's wave function in quantum mechanics. This phenomenon can intuitively be called patch collapse. To identify which patches are most relied on during a target region's collapse, we learn an autoencoder that softly selects a subset of patches to reconstruct each target patch. Graphing these learned dependencies for each patch's PageRank score reveals the optimal patch order to realize an image. We show that respecting this order benefits various masked image modeling methods. First, autoregressive image generation can be boosted by retraining the state-of-the-art model MAR. Next, we introduce a new setup for image classification by exposing Vision Transformers only to high-rank patches in the collapse order. Seeing 22\% of such patches is sufficient to achieve high accuracy. With these experiments, we propose patch collapse as a novel image modeling perspective that promotes vision efficiency. Our project is available at https://github.com/wguo-ai/CoP .
title The Collapse of Patches
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22281