by Amit Shekhar · 15 April 2026
Decoding Vision Transformer (ViT)
The Vision Transformer (ViT) by decoding how it splits an image into patches, turns those patches into tokens, and processes them with a transformer to classify the image.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guessWhat are the sequential steps for processing an image in a Vision Transformer?
Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.
What this article covers
- The Big Picture
- Decoding Step 1: Splitting the Image into Patches
- Decoding Step 2: Patch Embedding
- Decoding Step 3: The CLS Token
- Decoding Step 4: Position Embeddings
- Decoding Step 5: The Transformer Encoder
- Decoding Step 6: The Classification Head
- Putting It All Together
- ViT vs CNN
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.