# Transformers in Vision: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.01169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1,013 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 167 of its 286 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 167)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 1013)

- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04803/) (2021)
- [Transformers in Time Series: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07125/) (2022)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04554/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Focal Self-attention for Local-Global Interactions in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00641/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Equiformer: Equivariant Graph Attention Transformer for 3D Atomistic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11990/) (2022)
- [Curriculum Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10382/) (2021)
- [Understanding Robustness of Transformers for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14586/) (2021)
- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-Based Siamese Network for Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01293/) (2022)
- [Looped Transformers as Programmable Computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13196/) (2023)
- [Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07624/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Transformer: Geometry-Free Novel View Synthesis Through Set-Latent Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13152/) (2021)
- [Deep Contextual Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15047/) (2021)
- [I2SB: Image-to-Image Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05872/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Astounding results from Transformer models on natural language tasks have intrigued the vision community to study their application to computer vision problems. Among their salient benefits, Transformers enable modeling long dependencies between input sequence elements and support parallel processing of sequence as compared to recurrent networks e.g., Long short-term memory (LSTM). Different from convolutional networks, Transformers require minimal inductive biases for their design and are naturally suited as set-functions. Furthermore, the straightforward design of Transformers allows processing multiple modalities (e.g., images, videos, text and speech) using similar processing blocks and demonstrates excellent scalability to very large capacity networks and huge datasets. These strengths have led to exciting progress on a number of vision tasks using Transformer networks. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Transformer models in the computer vision discipline. We start with an introduction to fundamental concepts behind the success of Transformers i.e., self-attention, large-scale pre-training, and bidirectional encoding. We then cover extensive applications of transformers in vision including popular recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection, action recognition, and segmentation), generative modeling, multi-modal tasks (e.g., visual-question answering, visual reasoning, and visual grounding), video processing (e.g., activity recognition, video forecasting), low-level vision (e.g., image super-resolution, image enhancement, and colorization) and 3D analysis (e.g., point cloud classification and segmentation). We compare the respective advantages and limitations of popular techniques both in terms of architectural design and their experimental value. Finally, we provide an analysis on open research directions and possible future works.