Model reference · open weights

vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k

Embeddings timm Image embed 1 build Open weights 24k dl/mo

vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k is an open-weight embedding model from timm. vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k (FP32) weighs 172 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k is a Vision Transformer image feature extraction model developed by timm.
  • It was pretrained on the ImageNet-21k dataset and ported to PyTorch, operating on 224x224 pixel inputs.
  • The model contains 86M parameters and is distributed under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the timm/vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bytimm
Released2023-11-16
Parameters86M
VRAM172 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k (FP32)

172 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 timm says about vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k

Read the model card

A Vision Transformer (ViT) image classification model. Pretrained on ImageNet-21k in JAX by paper authors, ported to PyTorch by Ross Wightman. This model does not have a classification head, useful for features and fine-tune only.

Model Details

  • Model Type: Image classification / feature backbone
  • Model Stats:
    • Params (M): 85.8
    • GMACs: 16.9
    • Activations (M): 16.5
    • Image size: 224 x 224
  • Papers:
    • An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929v2
  • Dataset: ImageNet-21k
  • Original: https://github.com/google-research/vision_transformer

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('vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k', 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(
    'vit_base_patch16_224.orig_in21k',
    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, 197, 768) 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{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, which is the basis of search and RAG.
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