
MobileViT
Overview
The MobileViT model was proposed in MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer by Sachin Mehta and Mohammad Rastegari. MobileViT introduces a new layer that replaces local processing in convolutions with global processing using transformers.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the de-facto for mobile vision tasks. Their spatial inductive biases allow them to learn representations with fewer parameters across different vision tasks. However, these networks are spatially local. To learn global representations, self-attention-based vision trans-formers (ViTs) have been adopted. Unlike CNNs, ViTs are heavy-weight. In this paper, we ask the following question: is it possible to combine the strengths of CNNs and ViTs to build a light-weight and low latency network for mobile vision tasks? Towards this end, we introduce MobileViT, a light-weight and general-purpose vision transformer for mobile devices. MobileViT presents a different perspective for the global processing of information with transformers, i.e., transformers as convolutions. Our results show that MobileViT significantly outperforms CNN- and ViT-based networks across different tasks and datasets. On the ImageNet-1k dataset, MobileViT achieves top-1 accuracy of 78.4% with about 6 million parameters, which is 3.2% and 6.2% more accurate than MobileNetv3 (CNN-based) and DeIT (ViT-based) for a similar number of parameters. On the MS-COCO object detection task, MobileViT is 5.7% more accurate than MobileNetv3 for a similar number of parameters.
This model was contributed by matthijs. The TensorFlow version of the model was contributed by sayakpaul. The original code and weights can be found here.
Usage tips

MobileViT is more like a CNN than a Transformer model. It does not work on sequence data but on batches of images. Unlike ViT, there are no embeddings. The backbone model outputs a feature map. You can follow this tutorial for a lightweight introduction.
One can use [MobileViTImageProcessor] to prepare images for the model. Note that if you do your own preprocessing, the pretrained checkpoints expect images to be in BGR pixel order (not RGB).
The available image classification checkpoints are pre-trained on ImageNet-1k (also referred to as ILSVRC 2012, a collection of 1.3 million images and 1,000 classes).
The segmentation model uses a DeepLabV3 head. The available semantic segmentation checkpoints are pre-trained on PASCAL VOC.
As the name suggests MobileViT was designed to be performant and efficient on mobile phones. The TensorFlow versions of the MobileViT models are fully compatible with TensorFlow Lite.

You can use the following code to convert a MobileViT checkpoint (be it image classification or semantic segmentation) to generate a
  TensorFlow Lite model:

from transformers import TFMobileViTForImageClassification
import tensorflow as tf
model_ckpt = "apple/mobilevit-xx-small"
model = TFMobileViTForImageClassification.from_pretrained(model_ckpt)
converter = tf.lite.TFLiteConverter.from_keras_model(model)
converter.optimizations = [tf.lite.Optimize.DEFAULT]
converter.target_spec.supported_ops = [
    tf.lite.OpsSet.TFLITE_BUILTINS,
    tf.lite.OpsSet.SELECT_TF_OPS,
]
tflite_model = converter.convert()
tflite_filename = model_ckpt.split("/")[-1] + ".tflite"
with open(tflite_filename, "wb") as f:
    f.write(tflite_model)

The resulting model will be just about an MB making it a good fit for mobile applications where resources and network
  bandwidth can be constrained.
Resources
A list of official Hugging Face and community (indicated by 🌎) resources to help you get started with MobileViT.

[MobileViTForImageClassification] is supported by this example script and notebook.
See also: Image classification task guide

Semantic segmentation
- Semantic segmentation task guide
If you're interested in submitting a resource to be included here, please feel free to open a Pull Request and we'll review it! The resource should ideally demonstrate something new instead of duplicating an existing resource.
MobileViTConfig
[[autodoc]] MobileViTConfig
MobileViTFeatureExtractor
[[autodoc]] MobileViTFeatureExtractor
    - call
    - post_process_semantic_segmentation
MobileViTImageProcessor
[[autodoc]] MobileViTImageProcessor
    - preprocess
    - post_process_semantic_segmentation

MobileViTModel
[[autodoc]] MobileViTModel
    - forward
MobileViTForImageClassification
[[autodoc]] MobileViTForImageClassification
    - forward
MobileViTForSemanticSegmentation
[[autodoc]] MobileViTForSemanticSegmentation
    - forward

TFMobileViTModel
[[autodoc]] TFMobileViTModel
    - call
TFMobileViTForImageClassification
[[autodoc]] TFMobileViTForImageClassification
    - call
TFMobileViTForSemanticSegmentation
[[autodoc]] TFMobileViTForSemanticSegmentation
    - call

