Related papers: Implicit Regularization in Feedback Alignment Lear…

We theoretically analyze the Feedback Alignment (FA) algorithm, an efficient alternative to backpropagation for training neural networks. We provide convergence guarantees with rates for deep linear networks for both continuous and discrete…

While error backpropagation (BP) has dominated the training of nearly all modern neural networks for a long time, it suffers from several biological plausibility issues such as the symmetric weight requirement and synchronous updates.…

The success of gradient descent in ML and especially for learning neural networks is remarkable and robust. In the context of how the brain learns, one aspect of gradient descent that appears biologically difficult to realize (if not…

The feedback alignment (FA) algorithm offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks yet notably fails to scale to convolutional architectures. Modifications have been proposed to address…

Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) is emerging as an efficient and biologically plausible alternative to the ubiquitous backpropagation algorithm for training deep neural networks. Despite relying on random feedback weights for the backward…

Reinforcement Learning frameworks, particularly those utilizing human annotations, have become an increasingly popular method for preference fine-tuning, where the outputs of a language model are tuned to match a certain set of behavioral…

In natural vision, feedback connections support versatile visual inference capabilities such as making sense of the occluded or noisy bottom-up sensory information or mediating pure top-down processes such as imagination. However, the…

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy, yet it struggles with data heterogeneity, where clients' data are not distributed independently and identically (non-IID). This…

Preference-based alignment like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from pairwise preferences, yet the labels are often noisy and inconsistent. Existing uncertainty-aware approaches weight preferences, but ignore a more…

Ongoing studies have identified similarities between neural representations in biological networks and in deep artificial neural networks. This has led to renewed interest in developing analogies between the backpropagation learning…

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) with backpropagation (BP) achieves state-of-the-art accuracy but requires global error propagation and full parameterization, leading to substantial memory and computational overhead. Direct Feedback…

Feedback alignment algorithms are an alternative to backpropagation to train neural networks, whereby some of the partial derivatives that are required to compute the gradient are replaced by random terms. This essentially transforms the…

Artificial neural networks are most commonly trained with the back-propagation algorithm, where the gradient for learning is provided by back-propagating the error, layer by layer, from the output layer to the hidden layers. A recently…

Alternatives to backpropagation have long been studied to better understand how biological brains may learn. Recently, they have also garnered interest as a way to train neural networks more efficiently. By relaxing constraints inherent to…

Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate…

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

Fine-tuning is the primary mechanism for adapting foundation models to downstream tasks; however, standard approaches largely optimize task objectives in isolation and do not account for secondary yet critical alignment objectives (e.g.,…

Backpropagation is widely used to train artificial neural networks, but its relationship to synaptic plasticity in the brain is unknown. Some biological models of backpropagation rely on feedback projections that are symmetric with…

The backpropagation algorithm has long been the canonical training method for neural networks. Modern paradigms are implicitly optimized for it, and numerous guidelines exist to ensure its proper use. Recently, synthetic gradients methods…

Natural Language Feedback (NLF) is an increasingly popular mechanism for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences. Despite the diversity of the information it can convey, NLF methods are often hand-designed and arbitrary,…