Feed-Forward Optimization With Delayed Feedback for Neural Network Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Flügel, Katharina, Coquelin, Daniel, Weiel, Marie, Debus, Charlotte, Streit, Achim, Götz, Markus
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
author_facet Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
contents 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 the forward-backward dependencies, which limit biological plausibility, computational efficiency, and parallelization. Although several alternatives have been proposed to increase biological plausibility, they often come at the cost of reduced predictive performance. This paper proposes an alternative approach to training feed-forward neural networks addressing these issues by using approximate gradient information. We introduce Feed-Forward with delayed Feedback (F$^3$), which approximates gradients using fixed random feedback paths and delayed error information from the previous epoch to balance biological plausibility with predictive performance. We evaluate F$^3$ across multiple tasks and architectures, including both fully-connected and Transformer networks. Our results demonstrate that, compared to similarly plausible approaches, F$^3$ significantly improves predictive performance, narrowing the gap to backpropagation by up to 56% for classification and 96% for regression. This work is a step towards more biologically plausible learning algorithms while opening up new avenues for energy-efficient and parallelizable neural network training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_13372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Feed-Forward Optimization With Delayed Feedback for Neural Network Training
Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
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 the forward-backward dependencies, which limit biological plausibility, computational efficiency, and parallelization. Although several alternatives have been proposed to increase biological plausibility, they often come at the cost of reduced predictive performance. This paper proposes an alternative approach to training feed-forward neural networks addressing these issues by using approximate gradient information. We introduce Feed-Forward with delayed Feedback (F$^3$), which approximates gradients using fixed random feedback paths and delayed error information from the previous epoch to balance biological plausibility with predictive performance. We evaluate F$^3$ across multiple tasks and architectures, including both fully-connected and Transformer networks. Our results demonstrate that, compared to similarly plausible approaches, F$^3$ significantly improves predictive performance, narrowing the gap to backpropagation by up to 56% for classification and 96% for regression. This work is a step towards more biologically plausible learning algorithms while opening up new avenues for energy-efficient and parallelizable neural network training.
title Feed-Forward Optimization With Delayed Feedback for Neural Network Training
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13372