# Vision Transformers for Mobile Applications: A Short Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19365 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19365/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (2021)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10866/) (2023)
- [ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03404/) (2021)
- [EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01191/) (2022)
- [Mobile-Former: Bridging MobileNet and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05895/) (2021)
- [AdaViT: Adaptive Vision Transformers for Efficient Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15668/) (2021)
- [Chasing Sparsity in Vision Transformers: An End-to-End Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04533/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Token Sampling For Efficient Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15667/) (2021)
- [A Review of Sparse Expert Models in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01667/) (2022)
- [Group Fisher Pruning for Practical Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00708/) (2021)
- [EdgeNeXt: Efficiently Amalgamated CNN-Transformer Architecture for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10589/) (2022)
- [An Attention Free Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14103/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on many Computer Vision Tasks. Unfortunately, deploying these large-scale ViTs is resource-consuming and impossible for many mobile devices. While most in the community are building for larger and larger ViTs, we ask a completely opposite question: How small can a ViT be within the tradeoffs of accuracy and inference latency that make it suitable for mobile deployment? We look into a few ViTs specifically designed for mobile applications and observe that they modify the transformer's architecture or are built around the combination of CNN and transformer. Recent work has also attempted to create sparse ViT networks and proposed alternatives to the attention module. In this paper, we study these architectures, identify the challenges and analyze what really makes a vision transformer suitable for mobile applications. We aim to serve as a baseline for future research direction and hopefully lay the foundation to choose the exemplary vision transformer architecture for your application running on mobile devices.