Page 2: Understanding Transformers in Computer Vision

Transformers, introduced by Vaswani et al. in the paper "Attention Is All You Need," have become a
cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP) due to their ability to model sequential data
efficiently. In computer vision, however, the inherent grid-like structure of images presents unique
challenges that require adaptation of Transformer architectures.

One key aspect of Transformers is self-attention, which allows the model to weigh the importance of
different elements in a sequence when making predictions. In the context of images, self-attention
mechanisms can be applied across spatial dimensions, enabling the model to capture global context
effectively.

Several adaptations of Transformers for computer vision tasks have emerged, such as Vision
Transformers (ViTs) and Swin Transformers. These models utilize a combination of self-attention layers
and convolutional layers to process images hierarchically, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance
across various benchmarks.