# MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/

## Key facts

- Cited by 302 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 96 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 302)

- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [V2X-ViT: Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperative Perception with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10638/) (2022)
- [CoBEVT: Cooperative Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02202/) (2022)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11699/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00083/) (2024)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [Efficient Frequency Domain-based Transformers for High-Quality Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12250/) (2022)
- [Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11435/) (2023)
- [Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00748/) (2023)
- [InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16468/) (2024)
- [Dual Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03364/) (2023)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Controlling Vision-Language Models for Multi-Task Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01018/) (2023)
- [HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14284/) (2022)
- [Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08291/) (2023)
- [Accurate Image Restoration with Attention Retractable Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01427/) (2022)
- [Curricular Contrastive Regularization for Physics-aware Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14218/) (2023)
- [You Only Need 90K Parameters to Adapt Light: A Light Weight Transformer for Image Enhancement and Exposure Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14871/) (2022)
- [MB-TaylorFormer: Multi-branch Efficient Transformer Expanded by Taylor Formula for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14036/) (2023)
- [Fast Vision Transformers with HiLo Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13213/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01789/) (2022)
- [ProRes: Exploring Degradation-aware Visual Prompt for Universal Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13653/) (2023)
- [Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11157/) (2024)
- [Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10172/) (2024)
- [HM-ViT: Hetero-modal Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative perception with vision transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10628/) (2023)
- [Residual Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13712/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress on Transformers and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models provide new network architectural designs for computer vision tasks. Although these models proved to be effective in many vision tasks such as image recognition, there remain challenges in adapting them for low-level vision. The inflexibility to support high-resolution images and limitations of local attention are perhaps the main bottlenecks. In this work, we present a multi-axis MLP based architecture called MAXIM, that can serve as an efficient and flexible general-purpose vision backbone for image processing tasks. MAXIM uses a UNet-shaped hierarchical structure and supports long-range interactions enabled by spatially-gated MLPs. Specifically, MAXIM contains two MLP-based building blocks: a multi-axis gated MLP that allows for efficient and scalable spatial mixing of local and global visual cues, and a cross-gating block, an alternative to cross-attention, which accounts for cross-feature conditioning. Both these modules are exclusively based on MLPs, but also benefit from being both global and `fully-convolutional', two properties that are desirable for image processing. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed MAXIM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than ten benchmarks across a range of image processing tasks, including denoising, deblurring, deraining, dehazing, and enhancement while requiring fewer or comparable numbers of parameters and FLOPs than competitive models. The source code and trained models will be available at urlhttps://github.com/google-research/maxim.