Error Broadcast and Decorrelation as a Potential Artificial and Natural Learning Mechanism

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Erdogan, Mete, Pehlevan, Cengiz, Erdogan, Alper T.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Erdogan, Mete
Pehlevan, Cengiz
Erdogan, Alper T.
author_facet Erdogan, Mete
Pehlevan, Cengiz
Erdogan, Alper T.
contents We introduce Error Broadcast and Decorrelation (EBD), a novel learning framework for neural networks that addresses credit assignment by directly broadcasting output errors to individual layers, circumventing weight transport of backpropagation. EBD is rigorously grounded in the stochastic orthogonality property of Minimum Mean Square Error estimators. This fundamental principle states that the error of an optimal estimator is orthogonal to functions of the input. Guided by this insight, EBD defines layerwise loss functions that directly penalize correlations between layer activations and output errors, thereby establishing a principled foundation for error broadcasting. This theoretically sound mechanism naturally leads to the experimentally observed three-factor learning rule and integrates with biologically plausible frameworks to enhance performance and plausibility. Numerical experiments demonstrate EBD's competitive or better performance against other error-broadcast methods on benchmark datasets. Our findings establish EBD as an efficient, biologically plausible, and principled alternative for neural network training. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/meterdogan07/error-broadcast-decorrelation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11558
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Error Broadcast and Decorrelation as a Potential Artificial and Natural Learning Mechanism
Erdogan, Mete
Pehlevan, Cengiz
Erdogan, Alper T.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce Error Broadcast and Decorrelation (EBD), a novel learning framework for neural networks that addresses credit assignment by directly broadcasting output errors to individual layers, circumventing weight transport of backpropagation. EBD is rigorously grounded in the stochastic orthogonality property of Minimum Mean Square Error estimators. This fundamental principle states that the error of an optimal estimator is orthogonal to functions of the input. Guided by this insight, EBD defines layerwise loss functions that directly penalize correlations between layer activations and output errors, thereby establishing a principled foundation for error broadcasting. This theoretically sound mechanism naturally leads to the experimentally observed three-factor learning rule and integrates with biologically plausible frameworks to enhance performance and plausibility. Numerical experiments demonstrate EBD's competitive or better performance against other error-broadcast methods on benchmark datasets. Our findings establish EBD as an efficient, biologically plausible, and principled alternative for neural network training. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/meterdogan07/error-broadcast-decorrelation.
title Error Broadcast and Decorrelation as a Potential Artificial and Natural Learning Mechanism
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11558