# Can KAN Work? Exploring the Potential of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks in Computer Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06727/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19756/) (2024)
- [Wav-KAN: Wavelet Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12832/) (2024)
- [Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08790/) (2024)
- [A Temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02486/) (2024)
- [KAGNNs: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks meet Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18380/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks(KANs), as a theoretically efficient neural network architecture, have garnered attention for their potential in capturing complex patterns. However, their application in computer vision remains relatively unexplored. This study first analyzes the potential of KAN in computer vision tasks, evaluating the performance of KAN and its convolutional variants in image classification and semantic segmentation. The focus is placed on examining their characteristics across varying data scales and noise levels. Results indicate that while KAN exhibits stronger fitting capabilities, it is highly sensitive to noise, limiting its robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a smoothness regularization method and introduce a Segment Deactivation technique. Both approaches enhance KAN's stability and generalization, demonstrating its potential in handling complex visual data tasks.