The Vision Transformer (ViT) is a transformer encoder model (BERT-like) pretrained on a large collection of images in a self-supervised fashion.
Images are presented to the model as a sequence of fixed-size patches, which are linearly embedded. One also adds a [CLS] token to the beginning of a sequence to use it for classification tasks. One also adds absolute position embeddings before feeding the sequence to the layers of the Transformer encoder.
Note that this model does not include any fine-tuned heads.
By pre-training the model, it learns an inner representation of images that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled images for instance, you can train a standard classifier by placing a linear layer on top of the pre-trained encoder. One typically places a linear layer on top of the [CLS] token, as the last hidden state of this token can be seen as a representation of an entire image.
You can use the model for classifying an image among one of the 1000 ImageNet labels. See the model hub to look for other fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.
misc{oquab2023dinov2,
title={DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision},
author={Maxime Oquab and Timothée Darcet and Théo Moutakanni and Huy Vo and Marc Szafraniec and Vasil Khalidov and Pierre Fernandez and Daniel Haziza and Francisco Massa and Alaaeldin El-Nouby and Mahmoud Assran and Nicolas Ballas and Wojciech Galuba and Russell Howes and Po-Yao Huang and Shang-Wen Li and Ishan Misra and Michael Rabbat and Vasu Sharma and Gabriel Synnaeve and Hu Xu and Hervé Jegou and Julien Mairal and Patrick Labatut and Armand Joulin and Piotr Bojanowski},
year={2023},
eprint={2304.07193},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV}
}
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