Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for processing images using self-attention based neural networks. One of the methods includes obtaining one or more images comprising a plurality of pixels; determining, for each image of the one or more images, a plurality of image patches of the image, wherein each image patch comprises a different subset of the pixels of the image; processing, for each image of the one or more images, the corresponding plurality of image patches to generate an input sequence comprising a respective input element at each of a plurality of input positions, wherein a plurality of the input elements correspond to respective different image patches; and processing the input sequences using a neural network to generate a network output that characterizes the one or more images, wherein the neural network comprises one or more self-attention neural network layers.