The paper investigates weight perturbation (WP) as a derivative-free alternative to backpropagation for training fully connected MNIST networks. In shallow architectures, large-batch WP attains about 97% test accuracy, close to backpropagation, but under a ten‑epoch budget WP lags behind (90.2% vs. 97.4%). The study also shows diminishing returns beyond a batch size of 4,000 and that learning‑rate reduction and averaging of perturbation updates can stabilize deeper networks, though they do not yet match backpropagation accuracy.
arXiv:2602. 13298v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a controlled comparative study of convolutional neural network (CNN) topology and image classification performance across the architectural families VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet, evaluated on CIFAR-10 under a unified training protocol.
Predictive coding networks (PCNs) offer a biologically-plausible, local-learning alternative to back-propagation of errors (backprop). Nevertheless, they have remained largely confined to shallow architectures and evaluated on simple machine intelligence benchmarks.
arXiv:2610.20439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study classification dynamics under small initialization and identify a pronounced non-monotone behavior of accuracy that we call the accuracy well:...
arXiv:2402.11215v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The choice of batch size in minibatch stochastic gradient optimization is critical for both optimization and generalization performance in large-sc...
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.
ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.
arXiv:2607. 16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backpropagation makes training deep networks memory intensive because it must store intermediate activations.
arXiv:2607. 15745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Common practice when training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is to use randomly shuffled mini-batches.
arXiv:2607. 13380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically motivated alternative to backpropagation via local weight updates, yet routing error between layers still relies on an autograd Jacobian-transpose ($J^\top$) product - the last non-local operation in PC.
arXiv:2602. 07697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.
arXiv:2507. 01598v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Muon, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW.
arXiv:2602. 07494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deeper modern architectures are costly to train, making hyperparameter transfer preferable to expensive repeated tuning.