# KAN-Mixers: a new deep learning architecture for image classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Patches Are All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09792/) (2022)
- [How Does Attention Work in Vision Transformers? A Visual Analytics Attempt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13731/) (2023)
- [Predictive Modeling of Flexible EHD Pumps using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07488/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [KAN-Robust-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21488/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to their effective performance, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures have become the standard for solving computer vision tasks. Such architectures require large data sets and rely on convolution and self-attention operations. In 2021, MLP-Mixer emerged, an architecture that relies only on Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and achieves extremely competitive results when compared to CNNs and ViTs. Despite its good performance in computer vision tasks, the MLP-Mixer architecture may not be suitable for refined feature extraction in images. Recently, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) was proposed as a promising alternative to MLP models. KANs promise to improve accuracy and interpretability when compared to MLPs. Therefore, the present work aims to design a new mixer-based architecture, called KAN-Mixers, using KANs as main layers and evaluate its performance, in terms of several performance metrics, in the image classification task. As main results obtained, the KAN-Mixers model was superior to the MLP, MLP-Mixer and KAN models in the Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, with 0.9030 and 0.6980 of average accuracy, respectively.