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LLM ArchitectureFoundations Updated 2026

Vision Transformer (ViT)

A Transformer applied directly to image patches, showing that the architecture behind language models also excels at computer vision.

Dosovitskiy et al. (2021) split an image into fixed-size patches, treated each as a token, and fed the sequence to a standard Transformer. With enough pre-training data, this Vision Transformer matched or beat leading convolutional networks while using less compute — demonstrating that self-attention is a general architecture, not a language-only one.

ViTs are now common in multimodal models, where image and text are processed by related Transformer machinery.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
Dosovitskiy, A., Beyer, L., Kolesnikov, A., Weissenborn, D., Zhai, X., et al. (2021). International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "Vision Transformer (ViT)." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/vit

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