Let’s Dive Further with MobileNet

Can We Use Vision Transformers with MobileNet?

Not directly, but we can!

MobileNet can be integrated with transformer models in various ways to enhance image processing tasks.

One approach is to use MobileNet as a feature extractor, where its convolutional layers process images and the resultant features are fed into a transformer model for further analysis.

Another approach is training MobileNet and a Vision Transformer separately and then combining their predictions through ensemble techniques, potentially boosting performance as each model may capture distinct facets of the data. This multifaceted integration showcases the flexibility and potential of combining convolutional and transformer architectures in image processing.

There is an implementation of this concept, called Mobile-Former.

Mobile-Former

Mobile-Former is a neural network architecture that aims to combine both MobileNet and Transformers for effective image processing tasks. It’s designed to leverage MobileNet for local feature extraction, and Transformers for context understanding.

You can find other detailed explanations from Mobile-Former’s paper.

MobileNet with Timm

What is Timm?

timm (or PyTorch Image Models) is a Python library that provides a collection of pre-trained deep learning models, primarily focused on computer vision tasks, along with utilities for training, fine-tuning, and inference.

Using MobileNet through the timm library in PyTorch is straightforward, as timm provides an easy way to access a wide range of pre-trained models, including various versions of MobileNet. Here’s a basic implementation on how to use MobileNet with timm.

You must install timm with pip first:

pip install timm

Here is the basic code:

import timm
import torch

# Load a pre-trained MobileNet model
model_name = "mobilenetv3_large_100"

model = timm.create_model(model_name, pretrained=True)

# If you want to use the model for inference
model.eval()

# Forward pass with a dummy input
# Batch size 1, 3 color channels, 224x224 image
input_tensor = torch.rand(1, 3, 224, 224)

output = model(input_tensor)
print(output)

You can go to Timm’s Hugging Face Page and find other pretrained models and datasets for various tasks.