Model reference · open weights

vit_large_patch16_224.mae

Embeddings timm Image embed 1 build Non-commercial 41k dl/mo

vit_large_patch16_224.mae is an open-weight embedding model from timm. vit_large_patch16_224.mae (FP32) weighs 607 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • vit_large_patch16_224.mae is a Vision Transformer image feature model developed by timm and published as timm/vit_large_patch16_224.mae.
  • It is designed for image feature extraction and was pretrained on the ImageNet-1k dataset using the Self-Supervised Masked Autoencoder method.
  • The model contains 303M parameters, processes images of size 224 x 224, and is distributed under the cc-by-nc-4.0 licence.

Summary of the timm/vit_large_patch16_224.mae model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bytimm
Released2023-05-09
Parameters303M
VRAM607 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for vit_large_patch16_224.mae (FP32)

607 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_large_patch16_224.mae

Read the model card

A Vision Transformer (ViT) image feature model. Pretrained on ImageNet-1k with Self-Supervised Masked Autoencoder (MAE) method.

Model Details

  • Model Type: Image classification / feature backbone
  • Model Stats:
    • Params (M): 303.3
    • GMACs: 61.6
    • Activations (M): 63.5
    • Image size: 224 x 224
  • Papers:
    • Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06377
    • An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929v2
  • Pretrain Dataset: ImageNet-1k
  • Original: https://github.com/facebookresearch/mae

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_large_patch16_224.mae', 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_large_patch16_224.mae',
    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, 1024) 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{MaskedAutoencoders2021,
  author  = {Kaiming He and Xinlei Chen and Saining Xie and Yanghao Li and Piotr Doll{'a}r and Ross Girshick},
  journal = {arXiv:2111.06377},
  title   = {Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners},
  year    = {2021},
}
@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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