arXiv AI
Sep 2

A Study of Hidden-State Optimization Order in Predictive Coding Networks

The paper investigates how the sequence of hidden-state optimization affects feature learning in local-learning models, specifically predictive coding networks (PCNs). It introduces a boundary-first inference schedule that first aligns hidden states at chunk boundaries before refining representations within each chunk. Experiments on CIFAR-10 show that this approach improves accuracy by 9.77% over standard PCNs and 5.51% under a different parametrization, with diagnostics indicating stronger feature learning.

By Xueyuan Li, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas