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Equation 4 · Part 6 · The Hardest Unsolved Problems in Multimodal AI

fraction

Ntok=HP⋅WP,N_{\mathrm{tok}} = \frac{H}{P} \cdot \frac{W}{P},
fraction

What this part means

Divide the expression above the line by the one below it.

Its job in the formula

The expression above the fraction bar is divided by the complete expression below it. The denominator must not be zero.

The passage around this formula

There is a structural reason this compounds rather than merely adding up, and it is worth making explicit because it exposes an assumption rather than a vague sense of difficulty. A vision transformer front end tokenises an image of height H and width W at patch size P into NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}} = HP\frac{H}{P} ⋅\cdot WP\frac{W}{P}, and a video of T sampled frames multiplies that by T again. Any fixed context budget therefore forces a three-way trade between spatial patch size, temporal sampling rate, and clip duration — coarsen the patches, subsample frames, or truncate the clip. Whichever is chosen, information is discarded before a language model ever sees a token, and the TemporalBench failure…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

Open the illustrated fractions: division written vertically guide →

Sources cited in the article section

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.