Vision Transformers (ViT)

The Problem

Before 2020, computer vision meant convolutions. Every SOTA on ImageNet, COCO, and detection benchmarks used a CNN backbone. Transformers were for language.

Dosovitskiy et al. (2020) — "An Image is Worth 16x16 Words" — showed you can drop the convolutions entirely. Slice an image into fixed-size patches, linearly project each patch into an embedding, feed the sequence to a vanilla transformer encoder. At sufficient scale (ImageNet-21k pretraining or bigger), ViT matches or beats ResNet-based models.

ViT was the start of a broader pattern in 2026: one architecture, many modalities. Whisper tokenizes audio. ViT tokenizes images. Action tokens for robotics. Pixel tokens for video. The transformer doesn't care — feed it a sequence and it learns.

By 2026, ViT and its descendants (DeiT, Swin, DINOv2, ViT-22B, SAM 3) own most of vision. CNNs still win on edge devices and latency-sensitive tasks. Everything else has a ViT somewhere in the stack.

The Concept

Step 1 — patchify

Split a H × W × C image into an N × (P·P·C) sequence of flat patches. Typical setup: 224 × 224 image, 16 × 16 patches → 196 patches of 768 values each.

image (224, 224, 3) → 14 × 14 grid of 16x16x3 patches → 196 vectors of length 768

Patch size is the lever. Smaller patches = more tokens, better resolution, quadratic attention cost. Larger patches = coarser, cheaper.

Step 2 — linear embedding

A single learned matrix projects each flat patch to d_model. Equivalent to a convolution of kernel size P and stride P. In PyTorch this is literally nn.Conv2d(C, d_model, kernel_size=P, stride=P) — a 2-line implementation.

Step 3 — prepend [CLS] token, add positional embeddings

• Prepend a learnable [CLS] token. Its final hidden state is the image representation used for classification.
• Add learnable positional embeddings (ViT-original) or sinusoidal 2D (later variants).
• In 2024+ RoPE extended to 2D for position, sometimes without explicit embeddings.

Step 4 — standard transformer encoder

Stack L blocks of LayerNorm → Self-Attention → + → LayerNorm → MLP → +. Identical to BERT. No vision-specific layers. This is the pedagogical punchline of the paper.

Step 5 — head

For classification: take [CLS] hidden state → linear → softmax. For DINOv2 or SAM, discard [CLS], use the patch embeddings directly.

Variants that mattered

Why it took a while

ViT needs a lot of data to match CNNs because it has none of the CNN inductive biases (translation invariance, locality). Without >100M labeled images or strong self-supervised pretraining, CNNs still win at matched compute. DeiT fixed this in 2021 with distillation tricks; DINOv2 fixed it permanently in 2023 with self-supervision.

n5-patch-stream

Build It

See code/main.py. Pure-stdlib patchify + linear embedding + sanity checks. No training — ViT at any realistic scale needs PyTorch and hours of GPU time.

Step 1: fake image

A 24 × 24 RGB image as a list of rows of (R, G, B) tuples. We use 6×6 patches → 16 patches, 108-d embedding vector each.

Step 2: patchify

def patchify(image, P):
    H = len(image)
    W = len(image[0])
    patches = []
    for i in range(0, H, P):
        for j in range(0, W, P):
            patch = []
            for di in range(P):
                for dj in range(P):
                    patch.extend(image[i + di][j + dj])
            patches.append(patch)
    return patches

Raster order: row-major across the grid. Every ViT uses this ordering.

Step 3: linear embed

Multiply each flat patch by a random (patch_flat_size, d_model) matrix. Verify output shape is (N_patches + 1, d_model) after prepending [CLS].

Step 4: count parameters for a realistic ViT

Print the param count for ViT-Base: 12 layers, 12 heads, d=768, patch=16. Compare to ResNet-50 (~25M). ViT-Base lands at ~86M. ViT-Large ~307M. ViT-Huge ~632M.

Use It

from transformers import ViTImageProcessor, ViTModel
import torch
from PIL import Image

processor = ViTImageProcessor.from_pretrained("google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k")
model = ViTModel.from_pretrained("google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k")

img = Image.open("cat.jpg")
inputs = processor(img, return_tensors="pt")
out = model(**inputs).last_hidden_state   # (1, 197, 768): [CLS] + 196 patches
cls_emb = out[:, 0]                       # image representation

DINOv2 embeddings are the 2026 default for image features. Freeze the backbone, train a tiny head. Works for classification, retrieval, detection, captioning. Meta's DINOv2 checkpoints outperform CLIP on every non-text vision task.

Patch-size picking. Small models use 16×16 (ViT-B/16). Dense prediction (segmentation) uses 8×8 or 14×14 (SAM, DINOv2). Very large models use 14×14.

Ship It

See outputs/skill-vit-configurator.md. The skill picks a ViT variant and patch size for a new vision task given dataset size, resolution, and compute budget.

Exercises

1. Easy. Run code/main.py. Verify the number of patches equals (H/P) * (W/P) and the flat patch dimension equals P*P*C.
2. Medium. Implement 2D sinusoidal positional embeddings — two independent sinusoidal codes for row and col of each patch, concatenated. Feed them into a tiny PyTorch ViT and compare accuracy vs learnable positional embeddings on CIFAR-10.
3. Hard. Build a 3-layer ViT (PyTorch), train on 1,000 MNIST images with 4×4 patches. Measure test accuracy. Now add DINOv2 pretraining on the same 1,000 images (simplified: just train the encoder to predict patch embeddings from masked patches). Does accuracy improve?

Key Terms

Further Reading

• Dosovitskiy et al. (2020). An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale — the ViT paper.
• Touvron et al. (2021). Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention — DeiT.
• Liu et al. (2021). Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows — Swin.
• Oquab et al. (2023). DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision — DINOv2.
• Darcet et al. (2023). Vision Transformers Need Registers — the register-token fix for DINOv2.