lucidrains/vit-pytorch

This repository is a PyTorch implementation of Vision Transformer (ViT), an AI architecture for classifying images. Traditionally, image recognition used convolutional neural networks, a type of model inspired by how the visual cortex works. Vision Transformer takes a completely different approach: it splits an image into a grid of small patches (like puzzle pieces), treats each patch as a "token" (the same way words are tokens in natural language processing), and feeds those tokens through a Transformer encoder, the same core architecture used in large language models, to figure out what the image contains. The repository provides clean, well-organized Python code so researchers and practitioners can experiment with ViT and its many variants. Beyond the basic ViT, it includes dozens of extensions with names like SimpleViT, NaViT, Deep ViT, and Masked Autoencoder, each representing a different research paper that proposes an improvement or variation on the original idea. You would use this if you are working on computer vision research, want to experiment with image classification using Transformer-based models, or want to study how ViT variants differ in architecture. It requires PyTorch (a popular Python deep learning framework) and is installable via pip. It is primarily a research and learning resource rather than a production-ready tool.