English
Related papers

Related papers: Biologically-plausible backpropagation through arb…

200 papers

The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Thomas Miconi , Aditya Rawal , Jeff Clune , Kenneth O. Stanley

Developing biologically plausible learning algorithms that can achieve performance comparable to error backpropagation remains a longstanding challenge. Existing approaches often compromise biological plausibility by entirely avoiding the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Changze Lv , Yifei Wang , Yanxun Zhang , Yiyang Lu , Jingwen Xu , Xiaohua Wang , Di Yu , Xin Du , Xuanjing Huang , Xiaoqing Zheng

We propose a new learning framework, signal propagation (sigprop), for propagating a learning signal and updating neural network parameters via a forward pass, as an alternative to backpropagation. In sigprop, there is only the forward path…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-18 Adam Kohan , Edward A. Rietman , Hava T. Siegelmann

Spike-timing dependent plasticity in biological neural networks has been proven to be important during biological learning process. On the other hand, artificial neural networks use a different way to learn, such as Back-Propagation or…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Shiyuan Li

How physical networks of neurons, bound by spatio-temporal locality constraints, can perform efficient credit assignment, remains, to a large extent, an open question. In machine learning, the answer is almost universally given by the error…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-13 Benjamin Ellenberger , Paul Haider , Jakob Jordan , Kevin Max , Ismael Jaras , Laura Kriener , Federico Benitez , Mihai A. Petrovici

The brain processes information through many layers of neurons. This deep architecture is representationally powerful, but it complicates learning by making it hard to identify the responsible neurons when a mistake is made. In machine…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-11-04 Timothy P. Lillicrap , Daniel Cownden , Douglas B. Tweed , Colin J. Akerman

The error-backpropagation (backprop) algorithm remains the most common solution to the credit assignment problem in artificial neural networks. In neuroscience, it is unclear whether the brain could adopt a similar strategy to correctly…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-10-25 Will Greedy , Heng Wei Zhu , Joseph Pemberton , Jack Mellor , Rui Ponte Costa

Despite the widespread adoption of Backpropagation algorithm-based Deep Neural Networks, the biological infeasibility of the BP algorithm could potentially limit the evolution of new DNN models. To find a biologically plausible algorithm to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Jian-Hui Chen , Cheng-Lin Liu , Zuoren Wang

The plasticity property of biological neural networks allows them to perform learning and optimize their behavior by changing their configuration. Inspired by biology, plasticity can be modeled in artificial neural networks by using Hebbian…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Anil Yaman , Giovanni Iacca , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , George Fletcher , Mykola Pechenizkiy

Biological neural networks learn complex behaviors from sparse, delayed feedback using local synaptic plasticity, yet the mechanisms enabling structured credit assignment remain elusive. In contrast, artificial recurrent networks solving…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-12 Dimitra Maoutsa

Understanding how recurrent neural circuits can learn to implement dynamical systems is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. The credit assignment problem, i.e. determining the local contribution of each synapse to the network's global…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-08-08 Alireza Alemi , Christian Machens , Sophie Denève , Jean-Jacques Slotine

The backpropagation algorithm has promoted the rapid development of deep learning, but it relies on a large amount of labeled data and still has a large gap with how humans learn. The human brain can quickly learn various conceptual…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Yiting Dong , Dongcheng Zhao , Yang Li , Yi Zeng

Feedback alignment and related weight-transport-free algorithms are often proposed as biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation, yet they are typically formulated in discrete phases with implicitly synchronized forward and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Marc Gong Bacvanski , Liu Ziyin , Tomaso Poggio

Several recent studies attempt to address the biological implausibility of the well-known backpropagation (BP) method. While promising methods such as feedback alignment, direct feedback alignment, and their variants like sign-concordant…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Yukun Yang , Peng Li

How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-12-12 Julian Rossbroich , Friedemann Zenke

We present PredProp, a method for optimization of weights and states in predictive coding networks (PCNs) based on the precision of propagated errors and neural activity. PredProp jointly addresses inference and learning via stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 André Ofner , Sebastian Stober

Temporal models based on recurrent neural networks have proven to be quite powerful in a wide variety of applications. However, training these models often relies on back-propagation through time, which entails unfolding the network over…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Alexander Ororbia , Ankur Mali , C. Lee Giles , Daniel Kifer

Standard models of biologically realistic or biologically inspired reinforcement learning employ a global error signal, which implies the use of shallow networks. On the other hand, error backpropagation allows the use of networks with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Sama Daryanavard , Bernd Porr

In the brain, learning signals change over time and synaptic location, and are applied based on the learning history at the synapse, in the complex process of neuromodulation. Learning in artificial neural networks, on the other hand, is…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-12-11 Dennis G Wilson , Sylvain Cussat-Blanc , Hervé Luga , Kyle Harrington

In this paper, we propose a deep neural network approximation to the evolution operator for time dependent PDE systems over long time period by recursively using one single neural network propagator, in the form of POD-DeepONet with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Lizuo Liu , Wei Cai