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Vision Transformers Need Registers

2023/09/28 by Timothée Darcet, Darcet, Timothée, Maxime Oquab +5 · 12 voices · 308 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Algorithm #Artificial intelligence #Artificial neural network #Computation #Computer science #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #Engineering #Feature (linguistics) #Inference #Machine learning #Pattern recognition (psychology) #Supervised learning #Transformer

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.16588

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2023/09/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Transformers have recently emerged as a powerful tool for learning visual representations. In this paper, we identify and characterize artifacts in feature maps of both supervised and self-supervised ViT networks. The artifacts correspond to high-norm tokens appearing during inference primarily in low-informative background areas of images, that are repurposed for internal computations. We propose a simple yet effective solution based on providing additional tokens to the input sequence of the Vision Transformer to fill that role. We show that this solution fixes that problem entirely for both supervised and self-supervised models, sets a new state of the art for self-supervised visual models on dense visual prediction tasks, enables object discovery methods with larger models, and most importantly leads to smoother feature maps and attention maps for downstream visual processing.

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