Note that the state of the art results reported in the paper are achieved by pre-training the ViT model using the JFT-300M dataset, then fine-tuning it on the target dataset. To improve the model quality without pre-training, you can try to train the model for more epochs, use a larger number of Transformer layers, resize the input images, change the patch size, or increase the projection dimensions. Besides, as mentioned in the paper, the quality of the model is affected not only by architecture choices, but also by parameters such as the learning rate schedule, optimizer, weight decay, etc. In practice, it's recommended to fine-tune a ViT model that was pre-trained using a large, high-resolution dataset.