We present ResMLP, an architecture built entirely upon multi-layer perceptrons for image classification. It is a simple residual network that alternates (i) a linear layer in which image patches interact, independently and identically across channels, and (ii) a two-layer feed-forward network in which channels interact independently per patch. When trained with a modern training strategy using heavy data-augmentation and optionally distillation, it attains surprisingly good accuracy/complexity trade-offs on ImageNet. We also train ResMLP models in a self-supervised setup, to further remove priors from employing a labelled dataset. Finally, by adapting our model to machine translation we achieve surprisingly good results. We share pre-trained models and our code based on the Timm library.
@article{arxiv.2105.03404,
title = {ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training},
author = {Hugo Touvron and Piotr Bojanowski and Mathilde Caron and Matthieu Cord and Alaaeldin El-Nouby and Edouard Grave and Gautier Izacard and Armand Joulin and Gabriel Synnaeve and Jakob Verbeek and Hervé Jégou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.03404},
year = {2021}
}