What is Vision Transformers?

Vision Transformers (ViTs) apply the Transformer architecture, originally designed for natural language processing, to image recognition tasks. Instead of processing sequential words, an image is split into patches, treated as tokens, and fed into a standard Transformer encoder. ViTs have shown competitive performance compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on image classification benchmarks and are commonly used in tasks like image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation.