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Equation 7 · Part 3 · How Multimodal Models Actually Handle Video, Audio, and Space

Symbol P

Ntok=HP⋅WP⋅TPt.N_{\mathrm{tok}} = \frac{H}{P} \cdot \frac{W}{P} \cdot \frac{T}{P_t}.
PP

What this part means

the cut into square patches of size.

Its job in the formula

P occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.

Where the article explains it

An image of height H and width W , cut into square patches of size P , produces NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}} = HP\frac{H}{P} ⋅\cdot WP\frac{W}{P} tokens.

The passage around this formula

tokens. Video adds a third factor. If a model attends over T sampled frames, each cut into the same spatial grid, and groups PtP_t consecutive frames per temporal patch, the token count becomes Ntok=HP⋅WP⋅TPtN_{\mathrm{tok}} = \frac{H}{P} \cdot \frac{W}{P} \cdot \frac{T}{P_t}. Every added frame multiplies the spatial cost rather than adding to it. A minute of video at even a modest frame rate is not “a bigger picture” in the way a higher-resolution photograph is; it is a volume, and attention cost over a transformer sequence grows faster than the sequence itself. No system deployed today attends densely over every raw frame of a long clip, because nothing could afford to.

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Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the article section

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