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The Forward-Forward (FF) learning algorithm provides a bottom-up alternative to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks, relying on a layer-wise "goodness" function with well-designed negative samples for contrastive learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhichao Zhu , Yang Qi , Hengyuan Ma , Wenlian Lu , Jianfeng Feng

The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation, enabling neural networks to learn through local updates. However, FF's efficacy relies heavily on the definition of "goodness", which is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Arya Shah , Vaibhav Tripathi

While backpropagation and automatic differentiation have driven deep learning's success, the physical limits of chip manufacturing and rising environmental costs of deep learning motivate alternative learning paradigms such as physical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yaqi Guo , Fabian Braun , Bastiaan Ketelaar , Stephanie Tan , Richard Norte , Siddhant Kumar

Backpropagation is the pivotal algorithm underpinning the success of artificial neural networks, yet it has critical limitations such as biologically implausible backward locking and global error propagation. To circumvent these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 James Gong , Raymond Luo , Emma Wang , Leon Ge , Bruce Li , Felix Marattukalam , Waleed Abdulla

The forward-forward algorithm presents a new method of training neural networks by updating weights during an inference, performing parameter updates for each layer individually. This immediately reduces memory requirements during training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Michael Hopwood

Forward-only learning algorithms have recently gained attention as alternatives to gradient backpropagation, replacing the backward step of this latter solver with an additional contrastive forward pass. Among these approaches, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Erik B. Terres-Escudero , Javier Del Ser , Pablo Garcia-Bringas

Backpropagation is still the de facto algorithm used today to train neural networks. With the exponential growth of recent architectures, the computational cost of this algorithm also becomes a burden. The recent PEPITA and forward-only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Paul Caillon , Alex Colagrande , Erwan Fagnou , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, such as recommendation, drug discovery, and question answering. Behind the success of GNNs lies the backpropagation (BP) algorithm, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Namyong Park , Xing Wang , Antoine Simoulin , Shuai Yang , Grey Yang , Ryan Rossi , Puja Trivedi , Nesreen Ahmed

The application of deep learning to the area of communications systems has been a growing field of interest in recent years. Forward-forward (FF) learning is an efficient alternative to the backpropagation (BP) algorithm, which is the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Daniel Seifert , Onur Günlü , Rafael F. Schaefer

Backpropagation algorithm has been widely used as a mainstream learning procedure for neural networks in the past decade, and has played a significant role in the development of deep learning. However, there exist some limitations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Gongpei Zhao , Tao Wang , Yidong Li , Yi Jin , Congyan Lang , Haibin Ling

Incorporating the Forward Forward algorithm into neural network training represents a transformative shift from traditional methods, introducing a dual forward mechanism that streamlines the learning process by bypassing the complexities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Mitra Bakhshi

Neural networks (NN) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but their computation-intensive nature demands faster and more energy-efficient hardware implementations. Optics-based platforms, using technologies such as…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Robert O'Shea , Bipin Rajendran

We present the Graph Forward-Forward (GFF) algorithm, an extension of the Forward-Forward procedure to graphs, able to handle features distributed over a graph's nodes. This allows training graph neural networks with forward passes only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Daniele Paliotta , Mathieu Alain , Bálint Máté , François Fleuret

Backpropagation has been the cornerstone of neural network training for decades, yet its inefficiencies in time and energy consumption limit its suitability for resource-constrained edge devices. While low-precision neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jingxiao Ma , Priyadarshini Panda , Sherief Reda

The so-called Forward-Forward Algorithm (FFA) has recently gained momentum as an alternative to the conventional back-propagation algorithm for neural network learning, yielding competitive performance across various modeling tasks. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Erik B. Terres-Escudero , Javier Del Ser , Pablo Garcia Bringas

Forward-Forward (FF) training allows each layer to learn from a local goodness criterion. In cumulative-goodness variants, however, later layers can inherit a task that earlier layers have already partially separated. We formalize this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Amirhossein Yousefiramandi

The Forward-Forward (FF) Algorithm is a recently proposed learning procedure for neural networks that employs two forward passes instead of the traditional forward and backward passes used in backpropagation. However, FF remains largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Frank Wu , Mengye Ren

Over the past two decades, the feedforward neural network (FNN) optimization has been a key interest among the researchers and practitioners of multiple disciplines. The FNN optimization is often viewed from the various perspectives: the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-05-17 Varun Kumar Ojha , Ajith Abraham , Václav Snášel

Forward gradient learning computes a noisy directional gradient and is a biologically plausible alternative to backprop for learning deep neural networks. However, the standard forward gradient algorithm, when applied naively, suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Mengye Ren , Simon Kornblith , Renjie Liao , Geoffrey Hinton