
DeiT
Overview
The DeiT model was proposed in Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention by Hugo Touvron, Matthieu Cord, Matthijs Douze, Francisco Massa, Alexandre
Sablayrolles, Hervé Jégou. The Vision Transformer (ViT) introduced in Dosovitskiy et al., 2020 has shown that one can match or even outperform existing convolutional neural
networks using a Transformer encoder (BERT-like). However, the ViT models introduced in that paper required training on
expensive infrastructure for multiple weeks, using external data. DeiT (data-efficient image transformers) are more
efficiently trained transformers for image classification, requiring far less data and far less computing resources
compared to the original ViT models.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Recently, neural networks purely based on attention were shown to address image understanding tasks such as image
classification. However, these visual transformers are pre-trained with hundreds of millions of images using an
expensive infrastructure, thereby limiting their adoption. In this work, we produce a competitive convolution-free
transformer by training on Imagenet only. We train them on a single computer in less than 3 days. Our reference vision
transformer (86M parameters) achieves top-1 accuracy of 83.1% (single-crop evaluation) on ImageNet with no external
data. More importantly, we introduce a teacher-student strategy specific to transformers. It relies on a distillation
token ensuring that the student learns from the teacher through attention. We show the interest of this token-based
distillation, especially when using a convnet as a teacher. This leads us to report results competitive with convnets
for both Imagenet (where we obtain up to 85.2% accuracy) and when transferring to other tasks. We share our code and
models.
This model was contributed by nielsr. The TensorFlow version of this model was added by amyeroberts.
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