Vision Transformers Need Registers
Authors: name: Timothée Darcet, name: Maxime Oquab, name: Julien Mairal, name: Piotr Bojanowski

Transformers have recently emerged as a powerful tool for learning visual
representations. In this paper, we identify and characterize artifacts in
feature maps of both supervised and self-supervised ViT networks. The artifacts
correspond to high-norm tokens appearing during inference primarily in
low-informative background areas of images, that are repurposed for internal
computations. We propose a simple yet effective solution based on providing
additional tokens to the input sequence of the Vision Transformer to fill that
role. We show that this solution fixes that problem entirely for both
supervised and self-supervised models, sets a new state of the art for
self-supervised visual models on dense visual prediction tasks, enables object
discovery methods with larger models, and most importantly leads to smoother
feature maps and attention maps for downstream visual processing.