One Patch Doesn’t Fit All: Adaptive Patching for Native-Resolution Multimodal Large Language Models

Real-world visual signals are inherently variable in resolution, and it is natural to endow multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with such native-resolution perception capabilities. In principle, for general and straightforward multimodal understanding, low-resolution images are sufficient. While for images with nuanced details like documents and charts, it is crucial to preserve fine-grained details using high-resolution inputs, as naive resizing inevitably results in information loss. Recent advances employ sequence packing to process images of any resolution and aspect ratios. Despite these efforts, model performance degrades at both low and high resolutions, and high-resolution inputs incur substantial computational costs. We argue that the rigid use of a single patch size is the primary cause: when image resolution or information density varies, fixing patch size is intrinsically suboptimal. To address this issue, we introduce Adaptive Patching (AdaPatch), a simple yet effective strategy that adjusts patch size according to image resolution and information density and could be seamlessly plugged into pre-trained fixed-patch MLLMs without any training efforts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate consistent improvements in native resolution performance without additional training. Besides, we provide a training-based method to further adapt MLLMs with dynamic patch sizes and enhance the performance.