# Improving Generalizability of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks via Error-Correcting Output Codes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05798/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19756/) (2024)
- [Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks are Radial Basis Function Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06721/) (2024)
- [KAN 2.0: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks Meet Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10205/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Kolmogorov-Arnold Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06078/) (2024)
- [MedKAN: An Advanced Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18416/) (2025)
- [A Unified Benchmark of Federated Learning with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19639/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) offer universal function approximation using univariate spline compositions without nonlinear activations. In this work, we integrate Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) into the KAN framework to transform multi-class classification into multiple binary tasks, improving robustness via Hamming distance decoding. Our proposed KAN with ECOC framework outperforms vanilla KAN on a challenging blood cell classification dataset, achieving higher accuracy across diverse hyperparameter settings. Ablation studies further confirm that ECOC consistently enhances performance across FastKAN and FasterKAN variants. These results demonstrate that ECOC integration significantly boosts KAN generalizability in critical healthcare AI applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of ECOC with KAN for enhancing multi-class medical image classification performance.