fast-vit-hd

🏎️ FastViT-HD Image Encoder

A Hugging Face-compatible wrapper around the FastViT-HD vision backbone from
FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision-Language Models (Apple CVPR 2025).
This repo exposes only the image encoder – no text tower, no projection head – so you can plug it into any downstream pipeline that needs per-image embeddings.

<div align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm/raw/main/docs/acc_vs_latency_qwen-2.png" width="480"/> </div>

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✨ What you get

• 3072-D global embedding for any resolution (default 1024 × 1024).
• Runs out-of-the-box with transformers.
• Much faster than vanilla ViT-L/14 for high-res images (see original paper).

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🚀 Quick start

conda create --name fast-vit-hd python=3.10
conda activate fast-vit-hd
pip install torch torchvision transformers timm pillow

Then, run the following code to get a 3 072-D embedding for your image:

from transformers import AutoModel, AutoImageProcessor
import torch, PIL.Image

device = "cuda"  # or "cpu" / "mps"

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(
    "kevin510/fast-vit-hd", trust_remote_code=True
).to(device).eval()

processor = AutoImageProcessor.from_pretrained(
    "kevin510/fast-vit-hd", trust_remote_code=True
)

img = PIL.Image.open("your_image.jpg")
px  = processor(img, do_center_crop=False, return_tensors="pt")["pixel_values"].to(device)   # (1,3,1024,1024)

emb = model(px)
print(emb.shape)   # (1, D, 3072)

D is the number of patches (e.g. 16 × 16 for 1024 × 1024 input). For 1024 × 1024 input, D = 16 × 16 = 256.

🛠️ Implementation details

• Wrapper – FastViTImageEncoder extends PreTrainedModel; we keep the original GlobalPool2D head but replace the classifier by a 3 072 × 3 072 identity-mapped projection.

• Weights – lifted from Apple’s Stage-3 checkpoint llava-fastvithd_0.5b_stage3/fast_vit/fast_vit.pth.

• Config / processor JSONs follow the current transformers ≥ 4.48 schema.

📑 Citation

@inproceedings{fastvlm2025,
  title     = {FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models},
  author    = {Vasu, Pavan Kumar Anasosalu and Faghri, Fartash and Li, Chun-Liang et al.},
  booktitle = {CVPR},
  year      = {2025}
}

If you find this wrapper useful, please consider citing the upstream work above.

⚖️ License

The mci.py code implementation is licensed according to Apple's LICENSE; it is a modified version of the original mci.py from the FastVLM repo. The underlying weights inherit the license provided by Apple in their LICENSE_MODEL; review that file before use. All other code in this repo is licensed according to Apache 2.0.

🙏 Acknowledgements

• Original FastViT implementation and checkpoints by Apple ML Research – see https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm.
• Wrapper inspired by the CLIP / SigLIP integrations in 🤗 Transformers.