What is Vision Transformer (ViT)
Vision Transformer (ViT) - Transformer architecture applied to image understanding
A neural network architecture that applies the transformer's self-attention mechanism directly to image patches, replacing convolutional neural networks for visual understanding. Vision transformers power the visual encoders in modern multimodal AI systems.
How It Works
A Vision Transformer divides an input image into fixed-size patches (typically 16x16 or 14x14 pixels), linearly projects each patch into an embedding, adds positional embeddings, and processes the sequence of patch tokens through standard transformer encoder layers. A classification token ([CLS]) aggregates global information. Self-attention enables each patch to attend to all other patches, capturing both local and global relationships.
Technical Details
ViT-Base uses 12 layers, 768 dimensions, 12 heads (86M parameters). ViT-Large uses 24 layers, 1024 dimensions (307M parameters). Variants include DeiT (data-efficient training), Swin Transformer (shifted window attention for efficiency), and EVA (enhanced visual architectures). Pretrained on ImageNet-21K or larger datasets. ViT serves as the visual backbone in CLIP, BLIP-2, and other vision-language models.
Best Practices
- Use pretrained ViT models rather than training from scratch, which requires massive datasets
- Choose patch size based on the level of detail needed (smaller patches for fine-grained tasks)
- Apply ViT-based backbones for visual feature extraction in multimodal retrieval pipelines
- Use efficient ViT variants (Swin, EfficientViT) for latency-constrained applications
Common Pitfalls
- Training ViT from scratch on small datasets where CNNs with inductive biases perform better
- Not adapting positional embeddings when using ViT at different resolutions than pretraining
- Ignoring the quadratic attention cost of ViT when processing high-resolution images
- Using ViT for tasks where lightweight CNNs provide sufficient accuracy at much lower cost
Advanced Tips
- Use ViT as the visual encoder in multimodal models, extracting patch tokens for cross-attention with text
- Implement masked image modeling (MAE) pretraining on domain-specific images for better ViT representations
- Apply flash attention for efficient ViT inference on long sequences from high-resolution images
- Use ViT feature maps from intermediate layers for dense prediction tasks (segmentation, detection)