arXiv AI

Synthetic Benchmarks Overstate Forward-Forward Scaling: Real-Data Limits of Layer-Local Training

arXiv:2606. 06539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forward-Forward (FF) learning [Hinton, 2022] replaces backpropagation with strictly layer-local goodness updates.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

FFR: Forward-Forward Learning for Regression

arXiv:2606. 03927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a computationally efficient and biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) by training neural networks through purely local, layer-wise optimization.

By Xinyang Liu, Xuanyu Liang, Shiqi Ding, Boyang Li, Zhiqiang Que, Jiayang Li, Guosheng Hu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

FFR: Forward-Forward Learning for Regression

The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a computationally efficient and biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) by training neural networks through purely local, layer-wise optimization. However, FF is inherently designed for classification via contrastive positive-negative sample pairs, and extending it to regression poses fundamental challenges: continuous target space lack natural "opposites" for contrastive learning, and the standard goodness function carries no information about target magnitude or ordering.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Neural Spectral Capacity: Measuring and Designing Architectures from Network Specification Alone

The paper introduces Neural Spectral Capacity (NSC), a closed‑form metric derived from the singular‑value spectrum of weight matrices that can be computed solely from a network’s architectural specification. Unlike traditional measures such as #Params and #FLOPs, NSC captures architectural structure (depth, width, head, FFN allocations) and can be evaluated without instantiating the model, data, or gradients. Using a dynamic‑programming solver (NSC‑DP), the authors demonstrate that NSC can efficiently identify architectures that outperform existing training‑free proxies across Transformer and CNN families, and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results in tasks such as WikiText‑103 and commonsense reasoning with LLaMA‑7B. whyItMatters":"NSC provides a fast, architecture‑only proxy that outperforms conventional metrics and training‑free proxies, enabling more effective design and pruning of large models without costly training or data."

By Chenyu Zhu, Ruoyu Zhao, Zhichao Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

The Drift Contract: Spectral Updates for Depth-Robust Local Learning

The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.

By Fabien Polly