Related papers: Poor Man's Training on MCUs: A Memory-Efficient Qu…

State-of-the-art backpropagation-free learning methods employ local error feedback to direct iterative optimisation via gradient descent. Here, we examine the more restrictive setting where retrograde communication from neuronal outputs is…

Predictive coding (PC) is a biologically plausible alternative to standard backpropagation (BP) that minimises an energy function with respect to network activities before updating weights. Recent work has improved the training stability of…

The back-propagation (BP) algorithm has been considered the de-facto method for training deep neural networks. It back-propagates errors from the output layer to the hidden layers in an exact manner using the transpose of the feedforward…

Relieving the reliance of neural network training on a global back-propagation (BP) has emerged as a notable research topic due to the biological implausibility and huge memory consumption caused by BP. Among the existing solutions, local…

Despite being the cornerstone of deep learning, backpropagation is criticized for its inherent sequentiality, which can limit the scalability of very deep models. Such models faced convergence issues due to vanishing gradient, later…

The ever-growing size of training datasets enhances the generalization capability of modern machine learning models but also incurs exorbitant computational costs. Existing data pruning approaches aim to accelerate training by removing…

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory…

Physics intelligence and digital twins often require rapid and repeated performance evaluation of various engineering systems (e.g. robots, autonomous vehicles, semiconductor chips) to enable (almost) real-time actions or decision making.…

Most downstream adaptation methods tune all or part of the parameters of pre-trained models (PTMs) through gradient descent, where the tuning cost increases linearly with the growth of the model size. By contrast, gradient-free methods only…

We study the problem of training neural networks with quantized parameters. Learning low-precision quantized parameters by enabling computation of gradients via the Straight-Through Estimator (STE) can be challenging. While the STE enables…

Neural network learning is usually time-consuming since backpropagation needs to compute full gradients and backpropagate them across multiple layers. Despite its success of existing works in accelerating propagation through sparseness, the…

Motivated by the potential for parallel implementation of batch-based algorithms and the accelerated convergence achievable with approximated second order information a limited memory version of the BFGS algorithm has been receiving…

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computing with spiking neural networks (SNNs) is a promising energy-efficient computational approach. However, successfully training SNNs in a more biologically plausible and neuromorphic-hardware-friendly way is…

Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization have been proposed as memory-efficient alternatives to backpropagation (BP) for gradient computation, especially in low-resource settings. However, their…

The rising computational and energy demands of deep neural networks (DNNs), driven largely by backpropagation (BP), challenge sustainable AI development. This paper rigorously investigates three BP-free training methods: the Forward-Forward…

Backpropagation (BP) of errors is the backbone training algorithm for artificial neural networks (ANNs). It updates network weights through gradient descent to minimize a loss function representing the mismatch between predictions and…

Ill-posed linear inverse problems appear in many scientific setups, and are typically addressed by solving optimization problems, which are composed of data fidelity and prior terms. Recently, several works have considered a back-projection…

Backpropagation (BP) is widely used for calculating gradients in deep neural networks (DNNs). Applied often along with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or its variants, BP is considered as a de-facto choice in a variety of machine learning…

The backpropagation of error algorithm (BP) is impossible to implement in a real brain. The recent success of deep networks in machine learning and AI, however, has inspired proposals for understanding how the brain might learn across…

The long-held assumption that backpropagation (BP) is essential for state-of-the-art performance is challenged by this work. We present rigorous, hardware-validated evidence that the Mono-Forward (MF) algorithm, a backpropagation-free…