# ViTDet

## Overview

The ViTDet model was proposed in [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16527) by Yanghao Li, Hanzi Mao, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He.

VitDet leverages the plain [Vision Transformer](vit) for the task of object detection.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

*We explore the plain, non-hierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) as a backbone network for object detection. This design enables the original ViT architecture to be fine-tuned for object detection without needing to redesign a hierarchical backbone for pre-training. With minimal adaptations for fine-tuning, our plain-backbone detector can achieve competitive results. Surprisingly, we observe: (i) it is sufficient to build a simple feature pyramid from a single-scale feature map (without the common FPN design) and (ii) it is sufficient to use window attention (without shifting) aided with very few cross-window propagation blocks. With plain ViT backbones pre-trained as Masked Autoencoders (MAE), our detector, named ViTDet, can compete with the previous leading methods that were all based on hierarchical backbones, reaching up to 61.3 AP_box on the COCO dataset using only ImageNet-1K pre-training. We hope our study will draw attention to research on plain-backbone detectors.*

This model was contributed by [nielsr](https://huggingface.co/nielsr).

The original code can be found [here](https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/tree/main/projects/ViTDet).

Tips:

- At the moment, only the backbone is available.

## VitDetConfig

[[autodoc]] VitDetConfig

## VitDetModel

[[autodoc]] VitDetModel

    - forward