Model reference · open weights
dinov2-with-registers is an open-weight embedding model from Meta. dinov2-with-registers-base (FP32) weighs 173 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
dinov2-with-registers is a Vision Transformer model developed by Meta for image feature extraction. It has 87M parameters and is released under the apache-2.0 licence. The model uses register tokens to improve attention map interpretability and performance.
Summary of the facebook/dinov2-with-registers-base model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | Meta |
|---|---|
| Published under | |
| Type | Embedding models |
| Task | Image embed |
| Parameters (lead) | 87M |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2024-12-20 |
| Popularity | 225k downloads / month |
| Weights | 173 MB (dinov2-with-registers-base (FP32), file size) |
| Licence | Open weights |
What it runs on
Weights 173 MB (file size) · overhead about 1.1 GB.
| Card | Runs | Counted memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
Estimates, not measurements: the weights are the build's file size. No cache grows with use; a batch of inputs needs working memory of its own. Counted memory is 92 % of what CUDA reports for the card.
From the model card
Vision Transformer (ViT) model introduced in the paper Vision Transformers Need Registers by Darcet et al. and first released in this repository.
Disclaimer: The team releasing DINOv2 with registers did not write a model card for this model so this model card has been written by the Hugging Face team.
The Vision Transformer (ViT) is a transformer encoder model (BERT-like) originally introduced to do supervised image classification on ImageNet.
Next, people figured out ways to make ViT work really well on self-supervised image feature extraction (i.e. learning meaningful features, also called embeddings) on images without requiring any labels. Some example papers here include DINOv2 and MAE.
The authors of DINOv2 noticed that ViTs have artifacts in attention maps. It’s due to the model using some image patches as “registers”. The authors propose a fix: just add some new tokens (called "register" tokens), which you only use during pre-training (and throw away afterwards). This results in:
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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.
You can use the raw model for feature extraction. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.
Here is how to use this model:
from transformers import AutoImageProcessor, AutoModel
from PIL import Image
import requests
url = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)
processor = AutoImageProcessor.from_pretrained('facebook/dinov2-with-registers-base')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('facebook/dinov2-with-registers-base')
inputs = processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)
last_hidden_states = outputs.last_hidden_state
@misc{darcet2024visiontransformersneedregisters,
title={Vision Transformers Need Registers},
author={Timothée Darcet and Maxime Oquab and Julien Mairal and Piotr Bojanowski},
year={2024},
eprint={2309.16588},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16588},
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face — the full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.