Differentiable Hierarchical Visual Tokenization

Marius Aasan, Martine Hjelkrem Tan, Nico Catalano, Changkyu Choi, Adín Ramírez Rivera

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Vision Transformers rely on fixed patch tokens that ignore the spatial and semantic structure of images. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end differentiable tokenizer that adapts to image content with pixel-level granularity while remaining backward-compatible with existing architectures for retrofitting pretrained models. Our method uses hierarchical model selection with information criteria to provide competitive performance in both image-level classification and dense-prediction tasks, and even supports out-of-the-box raster-to-vector conversion.