KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Liu, Mengxi, Bian, Sizhen, Fortes, Vitor, Nicolas, Francisco Calatrava, Geißler, Daniel, Kiefer-Emmanouilidis, Maximilian, Zhou, Bo, Lukowicz, Paul
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866916024988729344
author Liu, Mengxi
Bian, Sizhen
Fortes, Vitor
Nicolas, Francisco Calatrava
Geißler, Daniel
Kiefer-Emmanouilidis, Maximilian
Zhou, Bo
Lukowicz, Paul
author_facet Liu, Mengxi
Bian, Sizhen
Fortes, Vitor
Nicolas, Francisco Calatrava
Geißler, Daniel
Kiefer-Emmanouilidis, Maximilian
Zhou, Bo
Lukowicz, Paul
contents Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_19031
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition
Liu, Mengxi
Bian, Sizhen
Fortes, Vitor
Nicolas, Francisco Calatrava
Geißler, Daniel
Kiefer-Emmanouilidis, Maximilian
Zhou, Bo
Lukowicz, Paul
Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.
title KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition
topic Artificial Intelligence
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19031