# facebookresearch/hiera

Hiera: A fast, powerful, and simple hierarchical vision transformer.

Repository: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hiera
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/hiera
Language: Python
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2024-03-02T06:16:12+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 20/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 85
- inputs: {"age_days": 1195, "days_push": 914, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1074, forks 61 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:29.011100+00:00)

## What it is
Hiera is the official PyTorch implementation of a hierarchical vision transformer from Meta AI (ICML 2023 Oral). It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on image and video tasks while being significantly faster than comparable models by removing unnecessary architectural components.

## Use cases
- use a fast vision transformer backbone for image classification
- extract features from images or videos with a pretrained hierarchical transformer
- benchmark vision transformer inference speed against ViT and Swin
- fine-tune a vision transformer for video understanding tasks
- integrate a simple efficient vision backbone into detection or segmentation pipelines

## When to choose
- you need a fast, accurate vision transformer backbone for images or video
- you want pretrained models with torch hub or Hugging Face support
- simplicity and inference speed matter more than exotic architectural features

## When to avoid
- you need a non-PyTorch framework like TensorFlow or JAX
- you require commercial use of the pretrained model weights (model zoo is CC BY-NC 4.0)
- you need a general-purpose transformer for NLP rather than vision

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: active
- function: machine-learning, deep-learning, image-processing, video-processing
- domain: computer-vision, deep-learning, machine-learning
- platform: python
- tags: vision-transformer, pytorch, image-classification, video-understanding, backbone, facebook-research, gpu

## Member repositories
- facebookresearch/hiera (main) score 20

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:29.011100+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:53:30.892774+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hiera (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:29.011100+00:00, sha 2333c00f49b3)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.