Disclaimer: The team releasing DINOv2 with registers did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.

Model description

The Vision Transformer (ViT) is a transformer encoder model (BERT-like) originally introduced to do supervised image classification on ImageNet.

Next, people figured out ways to make ViT work really well on self-supervised image feature extraction (i.e. learning meaningful features, also called embeddings) on images without requiring any labels. Some example papers here include DINOv2 and MAE.

The authors of DINOv2 noticed that ViTs have artifacts in attention maps. It’s due to the model using some image patches as “registers”. The authors propose a fix: just add some new tokens (called "register" tokens), which you only use during pre-training (and throw away afterwards). This results in:

no artifacts
interpretable attention maps
and improved performances.

Visualization of attention maps of various models trained with vs. without registers. Taken from the original paper.

Note that this model does not include any fine-tuned heads.

By pre-training the model, it learns an inner representation of images that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled images for instance, you can train a standard classifier by placing a linear layer on top of the pre-trained encoder. One typically places a linear layer on top of the [CLS] token, as the last hidden state of this token can be seen as a representation of an entire image.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model for feature extraction. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

How to use

Here is how to use this model:

python

from transformers import AutoImageProcessor, AutoModel
from PIL import Image
import requests

url = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

processor = AutoImageProcessor.from_pretrained('facebook/dinov2-with-registers-small')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('facebook/dinov2-with-registers-small')

inputs = processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)
last_hidden_states = outputs.last_hidden_state

BibTeX entry and citation info

bibtex

@misc{darcet2024visiontransformersneedregisters,
      title={Vision Transformers Need Registers}, 
      author={Timothée Darcet and Maxime Oquab and Julien Mairal and Piotr Bojanowski},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2309.16588},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16588}, 
}