Company
Date Published
Author
Akruti Acharya
Word count
1588
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are transformative models that bridge the worlds of image analysis and self-attention-based architectures. They combine the innovative architecture of Transformers, originally designed for sequential data, to process images by splitting them into patches, flattening those patches, and then applying a Transformer architecture to learn complex patterns and relationships within images. Unlike traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), ViTs rely on self-attention mechanisms, enabling them to capture long-range dependencies and global context within images. They have applications in various real-world tasks, including image classification, object detection, image segmentation, action recognition, generative modeling, and multi-modal tasks. Vision Transformers' ability to leverage pre-trained models for transfer learning also significantly reduces the need for extensive labeled data, making them practical for a wide range of applications.