Model reference · open weights

dino-vits16

Embeddings facebook Image embed 1 build Open weights 248k dl/mo

dino-vits16 is an open-weight embedding model from Meta. dino-vits16 (BF16) weighs 87 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • dino-vits16 is a Vision Transformer model developed by Meta for image feature extraction.
  • It was pretrained in a self-supervised manner on the ImageNet-1k dataset at a resolution of 224x224 pixels, processing images as sequences of 16x16 patches.
  • The model is released under the Apache-2.0 license and is intended for use in downstream tasks such as image classification.

Summary of the facebook/dino-vits16 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byMeta
Released2022-03-02
VRAM87 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for dino-vits16 (BF16)

87 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What Meta says about dino-vits16

Read the model card

Vision Transformer (ViT) model trained using the DINO method. It was introduced in the paper Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers by Mathilde Caron, Hugo Touvron, Ishan Misra, Hervé Jégou, Julien Mairal, Piotr Bojanowski, Armand Joulin and first released in this repository.

Disclaimer: The team releasing DINO did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.

Model description

The Vision Transformer (ViT) is a transformer encoder model (BERT-like) pretrained on a large collection of images in a self-supervised fashion, namely ImageNet-1k, at a resolution of 224x224 pixels.

Images are presented to the model as a sequence of fixed-size patches (resolution 16x16), which are linearly embedded. One also adds a [CLS] token to the beginning of a sequence to use it for classification tasks. One also adds absolute position embeddings before feeding the sequence to the layers of the Transformer encoder.

Note that this model does not include any fine-tuned heads.

By pre-training the model, it learns an inner representation of images that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled images for instance, you can train a standard classifier by placing a linear layer on top of the pre-trained encoder. One typically places a linear layer on top of the [CLS] token, as the last hidden state of this token can be seen as a representation of an entire image.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model for image classification. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

How to use

Here is how to use this model:

from transformers import ViTImageProcessor, ViTModel
from PIL import Image
import requests

url = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

processor = ViTImageProcessor.from_pretrained('facebook/dino-vits16')
model = ViTModel.from_pretrained('facebook/dino-vits16')

inputs = processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)
last_hidden_states = outputs.last_hidden_state

BibTeX entry and citation info

@article{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2104-14294,
  author    = {Mathilde Caron and
               Hugo Touvron and
               Ishan Misra and
               Herv{\'{e}} J{\'{e}}gou and
               Julien Mairal and
               Piotr Bojanowski and
               Armand Joulin},
  title     = {Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers},
  journal   = {CoRR},
  volume    = {abs/2104.14294},
  year      = {2021},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14294},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint    = {2104.14294},
  timestamp = {Tue, 04 May 2021 15:12:43 +0200},
  biburl    = {https://dblp.org/rec/journals/corr/abs-2104-14294.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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