justusschock:

However if your input is large enough and you can handle the corresponding output sizes you can feed batches off different sizes to the model.


How exactly are you doing this? Your answer seems to assume everything is of same size already.
The original question is if padding is required for variable size input. Let’s be direct and answer that directly. Is that always necessary or not? When is padding necessary and when is it not?
To my understanding it’s always required cuz batches have to be of the same size (unless I’m not understanding something or don’t know something).