Slices the image into fixed-size patches and projects each one into a token - how pixels become a sequence.
Vision transformers do not see pixels; they see patches. The image is cut into a grid of fixed-size squares, each flattened and linearly projected into an embedding - one 'visual token' per patch. From that point on the vision encoder is just a transformer over a sequence, which is exactly why the same machinery works for text and images.
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