From what I understand, Transformer Encoders and Decoders use a fixed number of tokens as input, e.g., 512 tokens. In NLP for instance, different text sentences have a different number of tokens, and the way to deal with that is to truncate the longer sentences and pad the shorter ones. As an additional input, a padding mask must be supplied to the Transformer so that its attention is only focused on the relevant tokens.
My question is: Is there something in the architecture that forces the transformer to have a fixed number of tokens as input? (and not adopt dynamically to the actual input length like RNNs for instance?)
For comparison, I think of fully-convolutional networks or RNNs with variable input lengths. They are agnostic to the actual input dimension because they perform pointwise operations on the different patches. When applying an RNN model to an n-tokens sentence, you compute the same block n times, and when computing it on a k-tokens sentence you will apply it k times. So this architecture does not require padding or truncating (at least not in theory, I do not refer here to implementation considerations). In transformers: embedding the tokens, computing attention, and feed-forward can be performed on different lengths of sequences since the weights are applied per token, right? So why do we still truncate and pad to a fixed size? Or perhaps it is feasible but not implemented in practice for other reasons?
I must be missing something...
I'll ask it differently to make my question more clear: Say I have an already-trained transformer model, trained on 512 fixed-sized inputs (truncated and padded). At inference time, if I would like to process a single, shorter sentence. Do I have to pad it or not?
Thanks