# Are we ready for a new paradigm shift? A Survey on Visual Deep MLP

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.04060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04060/

## Key facts

- Cited by 63 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 113 of its 194 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Visual Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09741/) (2022)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17558/) (2024)
- [LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10855/) (2023)
- [Correlation-aware Coarse-to-fine MLPs for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00123/) (2024)
- [Multi-Task Learning with Multi-Query Transformer for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14354/) (2022)
- [Augmenting Convolutional networks with attention-based aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13692/) (2021)
- [Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11268/) (2023)
- [When LLMs Meet Cunning Texts: A Fallacy Understanding Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11100/) (2024)
- [DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11493/) (2025)
- [Vision, Deduction and Alignment: An Empirical Study on Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08774/) (2023)
- [A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09119/) (2023)
- [Refine Knowledge of Large Language Models via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07184/) (2025)
- [MESED: A Multi-modal Entity Set Expansion Dataset with Fine-grained Semantic Classes and Hard Negative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14878/) (2023)
- [SA-MLP: Distilling Graph Knowledge from GNNs into Structure-Aware MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09609/) (2022)
- [Strip-MLP: Efficient Token Interaction for Vision MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11458/) (2023)
- [Active Relation Discovery: Towards General and Label-aware Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04215/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11420/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Adaptively Constraining Information Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20750/) (2025)
- [AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04550/) (2025)
- [EvoConfig: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems for Efficient Autonomous Environment Configuration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16489/) (2026)
- [Efficient Deep Spiking Multi-Layer Perceptrons with Multiplication-Free Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12465/) (2023)
- [Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18472/) (2026)
- [MLP Architectures for Vision-and-Language Modeling: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04453/) (2021)
- [ML-LMCL: Mutual Learning and Large-Margin Contrastive Learning for Improving ASR Robustness in Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11375/) (2023)
- [Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16707/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Associative Memory, Parallelized MLP-Mixer, and Symmetry Breaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12220/) (2024)
- [Fast matrix multiplication for binary and ternary CNNs on ARM CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09120/) (2022)
- [Towards Attribute-Entangled Controllable Text Generation: A Pilot Study of Blessing Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16557/) (2022)
- [Multi-task Transformer with Relation-attention and Type-attention for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10870/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, the proposed deep MLP models have stirred up a lot of interest in the vision community. Historically, the availability of larger datasets combined with increased computing capacity leads to paradigm shifts. This review paper provides detailed discussions on whether MLP can be a new paradigm for computer vision. We compare the intrinsic connections and differences between convolution, self-attention mechanism, and Token-mixing MLP in detail. Advantages and limitations of Token-mixing MLP are provided, followed by careful analysis of recent MLP-like variants, from module design to network architecture, and their applications. In the GPU era, the locally and globally weighted summations are the current mainstreams, represented by the convolution and self-attention mechanism, as well as MLP. We suggest the further development of paradigm to be considered alongside the next-generation computing devices.