Lomonosov Moscow State University
Lucas BeyerResearch Scientist · MetaResearcher↗
Researcher
Alexander Kolesnikov
MetaResearch Scientist
Kolesnikov co-created the Vision Transformer, which adapted the architecture behind modern language models to images by treating them as sequences of small patches.[1] It became a foundation for leading vision systems. He also helped develop Big Transfer, SigLIP and large-scale multimodal models.
Career & education
Current roleMeta2025-presentResearch Scientist
Meta2025-presentPreviously
OpenAI2024-2025Member of Technical Staff
Google DeepMind2023-2024Staff Research Scientist
Google Brain2018-2023
OpenAI2024-2025Google DeepMind2023-2024Google Brain2018-2023Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations155,316As of Nov 1, '26
citations+4,962Since last snapshot, Oct 1, '26
Selected contributions
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
With Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Dirk Weissenborn, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer and others ·The Vision Transformer recognizes images by treating patches like words in a sequence.
References
- An Image Is Worth 16×16 Wordsarxiv.org
The Vision Transformer paper presents image classification by applying a Transformer to a sequence of image patches.
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Reviewed August 8, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
