# MDMLP: Image Classification from Scratch on Small Datasets with MLP Source: [MDMLP: Image Classification from Scratch on Small Datasets with MLP]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:15:31.627Z Authors: Tian Lv, Chongyang Bai, Chaojie Wang Published: 2022-05-28T16:26:59.000Z ## Abstract The attention mechanism has become a go-to technique for natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Recently, the MLP-Mixer and other MLP-based architectures, based simply on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), are also powerful compared to CNNs and attention techniques and raises a new research direction. However, the high capability of the MLP-based networks severely relies on large volume of training data, and lacks of explanation ability compared to the Vision Transformer (ViT) or ConvNets. When trained on small datasets, they usually achieved inferior results than ConvNets. To resolve it, we present (i) multi-dimensional MLP (MDMLP), a conceptually simple and lightweight MLP-based architecture yet achieves SOTA when training from scratch on small-size datasets; (ii) multi-dimension MLP Attention Tool (MDAttnTool), a novel and efficient attention mechanism based on MLPs. Even without strong data augmentation, MDMLP achieves 90.90% accuracy on CIFAR10 with only 0.3M parameters, while the well-known MLP-Mixer achieves 85.45% with 17.1M parameters. In addition, the lightweight MDAttnTool highlights objects in images, indicating its explanation power. Our code is available at https://github.com/Amoza-Theodore/MDMLP. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()