From Pixels to Visual Tokens: How LLMs Actually 'See' Images

makaros622 · reddit · 2026-09-27

A Towards AI explainer walks through how multimodal LLMs process images: images are split into patches and encoded as visual tokens that enter the model alongside text tokens. It covers the trade-offs between token count, resolution and context length, and stresses that models don't 'see' like humans — they model visual information as sequences in high-dimensional space. A solid primer on multimodal input mechanics.

Original post →

More from Multimodal

Multimodal channel →