Model reference · open weights

vit_small_patch16_224.dino

Embeddings timm Image embed 1 build Open weights 35k dl/mo

vit_small_patch16_224.dino is an open-weight embedding model from timm. vit_small_patch16_224.dino (FP32) weighs 43 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • vit_small_patch16_224.dino is a Vision Transformer image feature model developed by timm and trained using the Self-Supervised DINO method.
  • It is designed for image classification and feature extraction tasks, processing inputs at a resolution of 224 x 224 pixels.
  • The model contains 22M parameters and is distributed under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the timm/vit_small_patch16_224.dino model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bytimm
Released2022-12-22
Parameters22M
VRAM43 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for vit_small_patch16_224.dino (FP32)

43 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_small_patch16_224.dino

Read the model card

A Vision Transformer (ViT) image feature model. Trained with Self-Supervised DINO method.

Model Details

  • Model Type: Image classification / feature backbone
  • Model Stats:
    • Params (M): 21.7
    • GMACs: 4.3
    • Activations (M): 8.2
    • Image size: 224 x 224
  • Papers:
    • Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14294
    • 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/dino

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_small_patch16_224.dino', 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_small_patch16_224.dino',
    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, 384) 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

@inproceedings{caron2021emerging,
  title={Emerging properties in self-supervised vision transformers},
  author={Caron, Mathilde and Touvron, Hugo and Misra, Ishan and J{'e}gou, Herv{'e} and Mairal, Julien and Bojanowski, Piotr and Joulin, Armand},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision},
  pages={9650--9660},
  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

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