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Related papers: Towards Biologically Plausible Computing: A Compre…

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One major criticism of deep learning centers around the biological implausibility of the credit assignment schema used for learning -- backpropagation of errors. This implausibility translates into practical limitations, spanning scientific…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Alexander Ororbia , Ankur Mali , Adam Kohan , Beren Millidge , Tommaso Salvatori

Understanding how the brain learns may be informed by studying biologically plausible learning rules. These rules, often approximating gradient descent learning to respect biological constraints such as locality, must meet two critical…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yuhan Helena Liu , Guangyu Robert Yang , Christopher J. Cueva

The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Maxence Ernoult , Fabrice Normandin , Abhinav Moudgil , Sean Spinney , Eugene Belilovsky , Irina Rish , Blake Richards , Yoshua Bengio

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jake Lance , Larry Kieu

The backpropagation algorithm is often debated for its biological plausibility. However, various learning methods for neural architecture have been proposed in search of more biologically plausible learning. Most of them have tried to solve…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Shashi Kant Gupta

Backpropagation of error (backprop) is a powerful algorithm for training machine learning architectures through end-to-end differentiation. However, backprop is often criticised for lacking biological plausibility. Recently, it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Beren Millidge , Alexander Tschantz , Christopher L. Buckley

Deep learning has redefined the field of artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to the rise of artificial neural networks, which are architectures inspired by their neurological counterpart in the brain. Through the years, this dualism between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Tommaso Salvatori , Yuhang Song , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Rafal Bogacz , Zhenghua Xu

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…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Theodore H. Moskovitz , Ashok Litwin-Kumar , L. F. Abbott

It is widely believed that the backpropagation algorithm is essential for learning good feature detectors in early layers of artificial neural networks, so that these detectors are useful for the task performed by the higher layers of that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Dmitry Krotov , John Hopfield

Interest in biologically inspired alternatives to backpropagation is driven by the desire to both advance connections between deep learning and neuroscience and address backpropagation's shortcomings on tasks such as online, continual…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Jack Lindsey , Ashok Litwin-Kumar

Backpropagation is the default algorithm for training deep neural networks due to its simplicity, efficiency and high convergence rate. However, its requirements make it impossible to be implemented in a human brain. In recent years, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Albert Jiménez Sanfiz , Mohamed Akrout

Error backpropagation is a highly effective mechanism for learning high-quality hierarchical features in deep networks. Updating the features or weights in one layer, however, requires waiting for the propagation of error signals from…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-11-21 Hesham Mostafa , Vishwajith Ramesh , Gert Cauwenberghs

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

Backpropagation has long been criticized for being biologically implausible due to its reliance on concepts that are not viable in natural learning processes. Two core issues are the weight transport and update locking problems caused by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Katharina Flügel , Daniel Coquelin , Marie Weiel , Charlotte Debus , Achim Streit , Markus Götz

Backpropagation (BP) has been pivotal in advancing machine learning and remains essential in computational applications and comparative studies of biological and artificial neural networks. Despite its widespread use, the implementation of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-15 Xinhao Fan , Shreesh P Mysore

Despite its widespread use in neural networks, error backpropagation has faced criticism for its lack of biological plausibility, suffering from issues such as the backward locking problem and the weight transport problem. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Chia-Hsiang Kao , Bharath Hariharan

Backpropagation (BP) is the standard algorithm for training the deep neural networks that power modern artificial intelligence including large language models. However, BP is energy inefficient and unlikely to be implemented by the brain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Francesco Innocenti

The backpropagation algorithm, or backprop, is a widely utilized optimization technique in deep learning. While there's growing evidence suggesting that models trained with backprop can accurately explain neuronal data, no backprop-like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Gananath R

Our brain consists of biological neurons encoding information through accurate spike timing, yet both the architecture and learning rules of our brain remain largely unknown. Comparing to the recent development of backpropagation-based…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Yukun Yang , Peng Li

The research presented in this paper advances the integration of Hebbian learning into Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for image processing, systematically exploring different architectures to build an optimal configuration, adhering…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Julian Jimenez Nimmo , Esther Mondragon