SplitMixer: Fat Trimmed From MLP-like Models

Abstract: We present SplitMixer, a simple and lightweight isotropic MLP-like architecture, for visual recognition. It contains two types of interleaving convolutional operations to mix information across spatial locations (spatial mixing) and channels (channel mixing). The first one includes sequentially applying two depthwise 1D kernels, instead of a 2D kernel, to mix spatial information. The second one is splitting the channels into overlapping or non-overlapping segments, with or without shared parameters, and applying our proposed channel mixing approaches or 3D convolution to mix channel information. Depending on design choices, a number of SplitMixer variants can be constructed to balance accuracy, the number of parameters, and speed. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that SplitMixer performs on par with the state-of-the-art MLP-like models while having a significantly lower number of parameters and FLOPS. For example, without strong data augmentation and optimization, SplitMixer achieves around 94% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with only 0.28M parameters, while ConvMixer achieves the same accuracy with about 0.6M parameters. The well-known MLP-Mixer achieves 85.45% with 17.1M parameters. On CIFAR-100 dataset, SplitMixer achieves around 73% accuracy, on par with ConvMixer, but with about 52% fewer parameters and FLOPS. We hope that our results spark further research towards finding more efficient vision architectures and facilitate the development of MLP-like models. Code is available at https://github.com/aliborji/splitmixer.