Backpropagation (BP) dominates deep learning training, but its reliance on gradients brings inherent troubles -- vanishing and exploding gradients. The pursuit of gradient-free methods has long been a goal in the field of artificial intelligence.
arXiv:2607. 08406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) dominates deep learning training, but its reliance on gradients brings inherent troubles -- vanishing and exploding gradients.
Over the past decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success on complex machine-learning tasks, yet the theoretical foundations of their performance remain incomplete. From a statistical viewpoint, a natural question is: can DNNs attain feature-learning and prediction consistency comparable to that of classical models?
arXiv:2606. 09928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a biologically inspired alternative to backpropagation by replacing gradient-based credit assignment with local, forward-only objectives.
The paper introduces LA-ReduNet, a lightweight adaptive version of the ReduNet neural network that uses hyperspherical manifold learning and adaptive step sizes to reduce the number of layers needed for the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR$^2$) objective to stabilize. By refining the layer‑wise update rule, LA-ReduNet achieves comparable classification accuracy while requiring far fewer layers and significantly less parameter storage—about 1/29 of the unfolded ReduNet module under the tested settings.
arXiv:2106. 06998v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training convolutional neural networks at scale demands substantial memory, largely because intermediate activations must be stored for backpropagation.
arXiv:2506. 14202v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability.
arXiv:2506.11030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training neural networks has traditionally relied on backpropagation (BP), a gradient-based algorithm that, despite its widespread success, s...
arXiv:2606. 12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks.
arXiv:2607. 06151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalization remains a pivotal challenge in deep learning, where traditional optimizers like Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often converge to sharp minima, leading to overfitting and reduced performance on unseen data.
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:2606. 06764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress has been made in understanding the statistical generalization performance of gradient descent methods for overparameterized neural networks within the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime.
arXiv:2603. 02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient.