CycleMLP: A MLP-like Architecture for Dense Prediction

This paper presents a simple MLP-like architecture, CycleMLP, which is a versatile backbone for visual recognition and dense predictions, unlike modern MLP architectures, e.g., MLP-Mixer [49], ResMLP [50], and gMLP [35], whose architectures are correlated to image size and thus are infeasible in object detection and segmentation. CycleMLP has two advantages compared to modern approaches. (1) It can cope with various image sizes. (2) It achieves linear computational complexity to image size by using local windows. In contrast, previous MLPs have quadratic computations because of their fully spatial connections. We build a family of models that surpass existing MLPs and achieve a comparable accuracy (83.2%) on ImageNet-1K classification compared to the state-of-the-art Transformer such as Swin Transformer [36] (83.3%), but using fewer parameters and FLOPs. We expand the MLPlike models’ applicability, making them a versatile backbone for dense prediction tasks. CycleMLP aims to provide a competitive baseline on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation for MLP models. In particular, CycleMLP achieves 45.1 mIoU on ADE20K val, comparable to Swin (45.2 mIOU). Code is available at https://github.com/ShoufaChen/CycleMLP.