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: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.
By Mohammadnavid Ghader, Saeed Reza Kheradpisheh, Bahar Farahani, Mahmood Fazlali
arXiv:2606. 06539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forward-Forward (FF) learning [Hinton, 2022] replaces backpropagation with strictly layer-local goodness updates.
By Yucheng Chen
arXiv:2607. 10391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks.
By Francesco Di Salvo, Shyam Nandan Rai, Hamed Damirchi, Ignacio Meza De la Jara, Sebastian Doerrich, Marco Lents, Christian Ledig
arXiv:2608. 14563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forward-Pass-Only MLP training (FPO) adapts large language models without a backward pass through the model body, achieving 2.
By Rivaan Patil, Simon Dennis, Hao Guo, Kevin Shabahang
arXiv:2607. 16295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made significant strides in understanding neural network representations, with sparse dictionary learning (SDL) methods, most prominently sparse autoencoders, as a central paradigm.
By Yiming Tang, Qinglin Qi, Zhaoqian Yao, Harshvardhan Saini, Dianbo Liu