What Are Vision Transformers And How Are They Important For General Purpose Learning?

Exploring The Concept and Experimenting with The Example Applications

Figure 1: Vision Transformers in Action (Source: Author)

There has been a significant advancement in the field of AI in the past several years. Generative models have been the most successful in the vision domain however, they are built for highly specialized tasks. These specialized learning models require reconstruction or retraining whenever the task is changed. Therefore, the interest in General purpose learning models is increasing. One of such type of models is called Transformers. In this article, we briefly discuss:

• What is a Transformer?

• What is a Vision Transformer (ViT)?

• What are the various applications of ViTs?

• How can ViTs be used for general purpose learning?