
BEiT
Overview
The BEiT model was proposed in BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers by
Hangbo Bao, Li Dong and Furu Wei. Inspired by BERT, BEiT is the first paper that makes self-supervised pre-training of
Vision Transformers (ViTs) outperform supervised pre-training. Rather than pre-training the model to predict the class
of an image (as done in the original ViT paper), BEiT models are pre-trained to
predict visual tokens from the codebook of OpenAI's DALL-E model given masked
patches.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
We introduce a self-supervised vision representation model BEiT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder representation
from Image Transformers. Following BERT developed in the natural language processing area, we propose a masked image
modeling task to pretrain vision Transformers. Specifically, each image has two views in our pre-training, i.e, image
patches (such as 16x16 pixels), and visual tokens (i.e., discrete tokens). We first "tokenize" the original image into
visual tokens. Then we randomly mask some image patches and fed them into the backbone Transformer. The pre-training
objective is to recover the original visual tokens based on the corrupted image patches. After pre-training BEiT, we
directly fine-tune the model parameters on downstream tasks by appending task layers upon the pretrained encoder.
Experimental results on image classification and semantic segmentation show that our model achieves competitive results
with previous pre-training methods. For example, base-size BEiT achieves 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K,
significantly outperforming from-scratch DeiT training (81.8%) with the same setup. Moreover, large-size BEiT obtains
86.3% only using ImageNet-1K, even outperforming ViT-L with supervised pre-training on ImageNet-22K (85.2%).
This model was contributed by nielsr. The JAX/FLAX version of this model was
contributed by kamalkraj. The original code can be found here.
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