A Vision Transformer makes an image look like a sentence — 16 16 patches become tokens and every patch attends to every other

The transformer was built for sequences of words. The Vision Transformer's one radical move is to make an image look like a sentence — and then run the exact same encoder from language on it, with no convolutions anywhere. That sounds like a hack, and in a sense it is, but it works, and building a live visualizer for it made the whole idea click. Here's the pipeline, end to end. An image is worth 16×16 words A ViT never sees a whole image. It chops the image into a grid of fixed,…