MLP don't "discard" spatial information. Rather, spatial invariance is a very useful inductive bias for learning that MLPs don't have. If you had a perfect opti

MLP don't "discard" spatial information. Rather, spatial invariance is a very useful inductive bias for learning that MLPs don't have. If you had a perfect optimizer MLP would outperform CNNs (assuming hard enough tasks) but you don't have a perfect optimizer.