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This paper presents a novel neural network training approach for faster convergence and better generalization abilities in deep reinforcement learning. Particularly, we focus on the enhancement of training and evaluation performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Mohammed Sharafath Abdul Hameed , Gavneet Singh Chadha , Andreas Schwung , Steven X. Ding

Backpropagation is the default learning rule for artificial neural networks and is often treated as the settled approach whenever differentiability is available. In this work, we revisit this convention through a theoretical lens of sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Yibo Jacky Zhang , Zeyu Tang , Sanmi Koyejo

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) compute using sparse communication and are attracting increased attention as a more energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks~(ANNs). While standard ANNs are stateless, spiking…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Balázs Mészáros , James C. Knight , Thomas Nowotny

Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ansh Nagwekar

The exploding and vanishing gradient problem has been the major conceptual principle behind most architecture and training improvements in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) during the last decade. In this paper, we argue that this principle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Antônio H. Ribeiro , Koen Tiels , Luis A. Aguirre , Thomas B. Schön

We introduce a new technique for gradient normalization during neural network training. The gradients are rescaled during the backward pass using normalization layers introduced at certain points within the network architecture. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Alejandro Cabana , Luis F. Lago-Fernández

Recurrent neural networks trained with the backpropagation through time (BPTT) algorithm have led to astounding successes in various temporal tasks. However, BPTT introduces severe limitations, such as the requirement to propagate…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Thomas Ortner , Lorenzo Pes , Joris Gentinetta , Charlotte Frenkel , Angeliki Pantazi

Neural networks have been able to achieve groundbreaking accuracy at tasks conventionally considered only doable by humans. Using stochastic gradient descent, optimization in many dimensions is made possible, albeit at a relatively high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-17 Hirsh R. Agarwal , Andrew Huang

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically plausible framework for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing. However, it is a challenge to train SNNs due to their non-differentiability, efficiently. Existing gradient approximation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Changqing Xu , Ziqiang Yang , Yi Liu , Xinfang Liao , Guiqi Mo , Hao Zeng , Yintang Yang

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), providing more realistic neuronal dynamics, have been shown to achieve performance comparable to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in several machine learning tasks. Information is processed as spikes within…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jiaqi Lin , Sen Lu , Malyaban Bal , Abhronil Sengupta

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently emerged as a prominent neural computing paradigm. However, the typical shallow SNN architectures have limited capacity for expressing complex representations while training deep SNNs using input…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-03-26 Chankyu Lee , Syed Shakib Sarwar , Priyadarshini Panda , Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan , Kaushik Roy

Recent architectural developments have enabled recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to reach and even surpass the performance of Transformers on certain sequence modeling tasks. These modern RNNs feature a prominent design pattern: linear…

Deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) hold great potential for improving the latency and energy efficiency of deep neural networks through event-based computation. However, training such networks is difficult due to the non-differentiable…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2016-09-01 Jun Haeng Lee , Tobi Delbruck , Michael Pfeiffer

Event-based neuromorphic systems promise to reduce the energy consumption of deep learning tasks by replacing expensive floating point operations on dense matrices by low power sparse and asynchronous operations on spike events. While these…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Johannes Christian Thiele , Olivier Bichler , Antoine Dupret

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired models that enable energy-efficient implementation on neuromorphic hardware. However, the supervised training of SNNs remains a hard problem due to the discontinuity of the spiking neuron…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Mingqing Xiao , Qingyan Meng , Zongpeng Zhang , Yisen Wang , Zhouchen Lin

Event-based machine learning promises more energy-efficient AI on future neuromorphic hardware. Here, we investigate how the recently discovered Eventprop algorithm for gradient descent on exact gradients in spiking neural networks can be…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Thomas Nowotny , James P. Turner , James C. Knight

In contrast to SGD, adaptive gradient methods like Adam allow robust training of modern deep networks, especially large language models. However, the use of adaptivity not only comes at the cost of extra memory but also raises the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Zhiyuan Li , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Manzil Zaheer , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Recent advances in event-based neuromorphic systems have resulted in significant interest in the use and development of spiking neural networks (SNNs). However, the non-differentiable nature of spiking neurons makes SNNs incompatible with…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Ali Lotfi Rezaabad , Sriram Vishwanath

Purpose: We propose a novel method for continual learning based on the increasing depth of neural networks. This work explores whether extending neural network depth may be beneficial in a life-long learning setting. Methods: We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Jędrzej Kozal , Michał Woźniak

Backpropagation (BP) has long been the predominant method for training neural networks due to its effectiveness. However, numerous alternative approaches, broadly categorized under feedback alignment, have been proposed, many of which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aymene Berriche , Mehdi Zakaria Adjal , Riyadh Baghdadi