Vision KAN: Towards an Attention-Free Backbone for Vision with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Abstract: Attention mechanisms have become a key module in modern vision backbones due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, their quadratic complexity in sequence length and the difficulty of interpreting attention weights limit both scalability and clarity. Recent attention-free architectures demonstrate that strong performance can be achieved without pairwise attention, motivating the search for alternatives. In this work, we introduce Vision KAN (ViK), an attention-free backbone inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks. At its core lies MultiPatch-RBFKAN, a unified token mixer that combines (a) patch-wise nonlinear transform with Radial Basis Function-based KANs, (b) axis-wise separable mixing for efficient local propagation, and (c) low-rank global mapping for long-range interaction. Employing as a drop-in replacement for attention modules, this formulation tackles the prohibitive cost of full KANs on high-resolution features by adopting a patch-wise grouping strategy with lightweight operators to restore cross-patch dependencies. Experiments on ImageNet-1K show that ViK achieves competitive accuracy with linear complexity, demonstrating the potential of KAN-based token mixing as an efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to attention.