
Vision Transformer (ViT)
Overview
The Vision Transformer (ViT) model was proposed in An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition
at Scale by Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk
Weissenborn, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer, Georg Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, Jakob
Uszkoreit, Neil Houlsby. It's the first paper that successfully trains a Transformer encoder on ImageNet, attaining
very good results compared to familiar convolutional architectures.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
While the Transformer architecture has become the de-facto standard for natural language processing tasks, its
applications to computer vision remain limited. In vision, attention is either applied in conjunction with
convolutional networks, or used to replace certain components of convolutional networks while keeping their overall
structure in place. We show that this reliance on CNNs is not necessary and a pure transformer applied directly to
sequences of image patches can perform very well on image classification tasks. When pre-trained on large amounts of
data and transferred to multiple mid-sized or small image recognition benchmarks (ImageNet, CIFAR-100, VTAB, etc.),
Vision Transformer (ViT) attains excellent results compared to state-of-the-art convolutional networks while requiring
substantially fewer computational resources to train.