# MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1,446 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 1446)

- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03885/) (2024)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07998/) (2021)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [ResNet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00476/) (2021)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [FNet: Mixing Tokens with Fourier Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03824/) (2021)
- [TimeMixer: Decomposable Multiscale Mixing for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14616/) (2024)
- [Choose a Transformer: Fourier or Galerkin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14995/) (2021)
- [ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03404/) (2021)
- [XCiT: Cross-Covariance Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09681/) (2021)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10274/) (2025)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Scaling & Shifting Your Features: A New Baseline for Efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08823/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the go-to model for computer vision. Recently, attention-based networks, such as the Vision Transformer, have also become popular. In this paper we show that while convolutions and attention are both sufficient for good performance, neither of them are necessary. We present MLP-Mixer, an architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). MLP-Mixer contains two types of layers: one with MLPs applied independently to image patches (i.e. "mixing" the per-location features), and one with MLPs applied across patches (i.e. "mixing" spatial information). When trained on large datasets, or with modern regularization schemes, MLP-Mixer attains competitive scores on image classification benchmarks, with pre-training and inference cost comparable to state-of-the-art models. We hope that these results spark further research beyond the realms of well established CNNs and Transformers.