In deep learning, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a name for a modern feedforward neural network consisting of fully connected neurons with nonlinear activation functions, organized in layers, notable for being able to distinguish data that is not linearly separable.
Modern neural networks are trained using backpropagation and are colloquially referred to as "vanilla" networks. MLPs grew out of an effort to improve single-layer perceptrons, which could only be applied to linearly separable data. A perceptron traditionally used a Heaviside step function as its nonlinear activation function. However, the backpropagation algorithm requires that modern MLPs use continuous activation functions such as sigmoid or ReLU.
Multilayer perceptrons form the basis of deep learning, and are applicable across a vast set of diverse domains.