The document introduces LightGBM, a gradient boosting framework that improves training speed, accuracy, and efficiency through features like histogram-based splitting, exclusive feature bundling, and gradient-based sampling. It contrasts this with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), which are neural networks consisting of multiple layers with fully connected neurons for classification and regression tasks. While LightGBM handles large datasets and categorical variables effectively, it has disadvantages such as difficulty in parameter tuning and GPU configuration challenges.