The following code implements the paper An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale authored by the Google Brain Team.

• ViT is a Transformed based Image Classification model trained in supervised fashion.

• The paper experiments by applying a Standard Transformer directly on images by creating a sequence of linear embeddings (Patch Embeddings).

• The patches are treated just like words.

• In addition to the Patch Embedding, A Class embedding and a 1D Positional Embedding is also added before passing to the Transformer.

• When giving more data to train, The models outperforms ResNet-based baselines.

• It is advised to pre-train the model on a large dataset, then fine-tune for specific tasks.

• A patch_size is selected, based on which the images is then divided into appropriate num_patches patches.

• To patchify the image, a 2D Convolution with zero padding, with stride, kernel of patch_size is used and is expanded to the required embedding_dim

• These patches are then flattened and converted into linear projections.

• Generated Embedding: Image -> [Patch_1_Embedding, Patch_2_Embedding, ..., Patch_n, Embedding]

• Similar to BERT, A learnable class token embedding is prepended to the Patch Embedding.
• Generated Embedding: [Class_Embedding, Patch_1_Embedding, Patch_2_Embedding, ..., Patch_n, Embedding]

• Locality information is passed on by adding a Positional embedding to the concatenated Class + Patch Embedding. (note: size is num_patches + 1)

• Generated Embedding: [Class_Embedding, Patch_1_Embedding, Patch_2_Embedding, ..., Patch_n, Embedding] + [Pos_0_Embedding, Pos_1_Embedding, Pos_2_Embedding, ..., Pos_n_Embedding]

• A Standard Transfomer is used. Various variants are specified in the ViT paper, based on which we initialize this Transformer

• Batch Norm, Multi-Head Attention, Skip Connections, Multi Layer Percepton (MLP), GELU activation are the components used to build the Transformer Block.

• Multiple Transformer layers are stacked back-to-back.

• The output of Transformer is passed into a MLP.

• The output is soft-maxed into the num_classes.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Dependencies

torch
torchvision
torchinfo
tqdm
numpy
pandas
matplotlib

python train.py --model <model_variant> --num_epochs <number_of_epochs> --batch_size <batch_size>

• model_variant: desired ViT variant (base, large, or huge). Default: base.
• num_epochs: desired Epochs. Default: 10.
• batch_size: desired Batch Size, Default: 32

• Citing original authors for the architecture, diagrams used.

Dosovitskiy, A., Beyer, L., Kolesnikov, A., Weissenborn, D., Zhai, X., Unterthiner, T., Dehghani, M., Minderer, M., Heigold, G., Gelly, S., Uszkoreit, J., & Houlsby, N. (2021). "An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale." arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.11929.

• Implementation by mrdbourke is referred.