Model reference · open weights

samvit_large_patch16.sa1b

Embeddings timm Image embed 1 build Open weights 3k dl/mo

samvit_large_patch16.sa1b is an open-weight embedding model from timm. samvit_large_patch16.sa1b (FP32) weighs 617 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

samvit_large_patch16.sa1b is an image feature extraction model developed by timm. It is a Segment-Anything Vision Transformer pretrained on the SA-1B dataset for segmentation tasks, with the segmentation head excluded. The model contains 308M parameters and is distributed under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the timm/samvit_large_patch16.sa1b model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bytimm
TypeEmbedding models
TaskImage embed
Parameters (lead)308M
Runs withtimm
Released2023-05-18
Popularity3k downloads / month
Weights617 MB (samvit_large_patch16.sa1b (FP32), file size)
LicenceOpen weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for samvit_large_patch16.sa1b (FP32)

Weights 617 MB (file size) · overhead about 1.1 GB.

CardRunsCounted
memory
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

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

What timm says about samvit_large_patch16.sa1b

Read the model card

A Segment-Anything Vision Transformer (SAM ViT) image feature model (NOTE: for features and fine-tune, segmentation head not included). Pretrained on SA-1B for segementation by paper authors w/ initialization from MAE weights.

Model Details

  • Model Type: Image classification / feature backbone
  • Model Stats:
    • Params (M): 308.3
    • GMACs: 1493.9
    • Activations (M): 2553.8
    • Image size: 1024 x 1024
  • Papers:
    • Segment Anything: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02643
    • An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929v2
  • Original: https://github.com/facebookresearch/segment-anything
  • Pretrain Dataset: SA-1B

Model Usage

Image Classification

from urllib.request import urlopen
from PIL import Image
import timm

img = Image.open(urlopen(
    'https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/beignets-task-guide.png'
))

model = timm.create_model('samvit_large_patch16.sa1b', pretrained=True)
model = model.eval()

# get model specific transforms (normalization, resize)
data_config = timm.data.resolve_model_data_config(model)
transforms = timm.data.create_transform(**data_config, is_training=False)

output = model(transforms(img).unsqueeze(0))  # unsqueeze single image into batch of 1

top5_probabilities, top5_class_indices = torch.topk(output.softmax(dim=1) * 100, k=5)

Image Embeddings

from urllib.request import urlopen
from PIL import Image
import timm

img = Image.open(urlopen(
    'https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/beignets-task-guide.png'
))

model = timm.create_model(
    'samvit_large_patch16.sa1b',
    pretrained=True,
    num_classes=0,  # remove classifier nn.Linear
)
model = model.eval()

# get model specific transforms (normalization, resize)
data_config = timm.data.resolve_model_data_config(model)
transforms = timm.data.create_transform(**data_config, is_training=False)

output = model(transforms(img).unsqueeze(0))  # output is (batch_size, num_features) shaped tensor

# or equivalently (without needing to set num_classes=0)

output = model.forward_features(transforms(img).unsqueeze(0))
# output is unpooled, a (1, 256, 64, 64) shaped tensor

output = model.forward_head(output, pre_logits=True)
# output is a (1, num_features) shaped tensor

Model Comparison

Explore the dataset and runtime metrics of this model in timm model results.

Citation

@article{kirillov2023segany,
  title={Segment Anything},
  author={Kirillov, Alexander and Mintun, Eric and Ravi, Nikhila and Mao, Hanzi and Rolland, Chloe and Gustafson, Laura and Xiao, Tete and Whitehead, Spencer and Berg, Alexander C. and Lo, Wan-Yen and Doll{'a}r, Piotr and Girshick, Ross},
  journal={arXiv:2304.02643},
  year={2023}
}
@article{dosovitskiy2020vit,
  title={An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale},
  author={Dosovitskiy, Alexey and Beyer, Lucas and Kolesnikov, Alexander and Weissenborn, Dirk and Zhai, Xiaohua and Unterthiner, Thomas and  Dehghani, Mostafa and Minderer, Matthias and Heigold, Georg and Gelly, Sylvain and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Houlsby, Neil},
  journal={ICLR},
  year={2021}
}
@misc{rw2019timm,
  author = {Ross Wightman},
  title = {PyTorch Image Models},
  year = {2019},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.4414861},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-image-models}}
}

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

How it works

How embedding models work

Your textsentence / documentEncodermaps meaningVectorlist of numbersAn embedding model turns text into a vector, so similar meanings sit close together — the basis of search and RAG.
© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms