Bridging KAN and MLP: MJKAN, a Hybrid Architecture with Both Efficiency and Expressiveness

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Joo, Hanseon, Choi, Hayoung, Lee, Ook, Cheon, Minjong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Joo, Hanseon
Choi, Hayoung
Lee, Ook
Cheon, Minjong
author_facet Joo, Hanseon
Choi, Hayoung
Lee, Ook
Cheon, Minjong
contents Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have garnered attention for replacing fixed activation functions with learnable univariate functions, but they exhibit practical limitations, including high computational costs and performance deficits in general classification tasks. In this paper, we propose the Modulation Joint KAN (MJKAN), a novel neural network layer designed to overcome these challenges. MJKAN integrates a FiLM (Feature-wise Linear Modulation)-like mechanism with Radial Basis Function (RBF) activations, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the non-linear expressive power of KANs with the efficiency of Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). We empirically validated MJKAN's performance across a diverse set of benchmarks, including function regression, image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10/100), and natural language processing (AG News, SMS Spam). The results demonstrate that MJKAN achieves superior approximation capabilities in function regression tasks, significantly outperforming MLPs, with performance improving as the number of basis functions increases. Conversely, in image and text classification, its performance was competitive with MLPs but revealed a critical dependency on the number of basis functions. We found that a smaller basis size was crucial for better generalization, highlighting that the model's capacity must be carefully tuned to the complexity of the data to prevent overfitting. In conclusion, MJKAN offers a flexible architecture that inherits the theoretical advantages of KANs while improving computational efficiency and practical viability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04690
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging KAN and MLP: MJKAN, a Hybrid Architecture with Both Efficiency and Expressiveness
Joo, Hanseon
Choi, Hayoung
Lee, Ook
Cheon, Minjong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have garnered attention for replacing fixed activation functions with learnable univariate functions, but they exhibit practical limitations, including high computational costs and performance deficits in general classification tasks. In this paper, we propose the Modulation Joint KAN (MJKAN), a novel neural network layer designed to overcome these challenges. MJKAN integrates a FiLM (Feature-wise Linear Modulation)-like mechanism with Radial Basis Function (RBF) activations, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the non-linear expressive power of KANs with the efficiency of Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). We empirically validated MJKAN's performance across a diverse set of benchmarks, including function regression, image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10/100), and natural language processing (AG News, SMS Spam). The results demonstrate that MJKAN achieves superior approximation capabilities in function regression tasks, significantly outperforming MLPs, with performance improving as the number of basis functions increases. Conversely, in image and text classification, its performance was competitive with MLPs but revealed a critical dependency on the number of basis functions. We found that a smaller basis size was crucial for better generalization, highlighting that the model's capacity must be carefully tuned to the complexity of the data to prevent overfitting. In conclusion, MJKAN offers a flexible architecture that inherits the theoretical advantages of KANs while improving computational efficiency and practical viability.
title Bridging KAN and MLP: MJKAN, a Hybrid Architecture with Both Efficiency and Expressiveness
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04690