Vision Transformers — When Attention Came for Images
For a decade, convolution was synonymous with computer vision. Then the transformer — the architecture that revolutionized language — was applied to images, and the vision transformer showed that attention could match or beat CNNs given enough data. It's a profound shift: the same architecture now underpins both language and vision, enabling the multimodal models that see and read at once. This post explains how transformers handle images and what their rise means.
The vision transformer treats an image as a sequence of patches and runs a standard transformer, giving global context immediately. The deep trade-off (CNN inductive bias vs ViT learning from data — ViTs win at scale) and the big consequence: one architecture now unifies vision and language, enabling multimodal AI.