Minimizing Control for Credit Assignment with Strong Feedback

Authors: Alexander Meulemans, Matilde Tristany Farinha, Maria R. Cervera, João Sacramento, Benjamin F. Grewe

ICML 2022 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We complement our theoretical results with experiments on standard computer-vision benchmarks, showing competitive performance to backpropagation as well as robustness to noise. Overall, our work presents a fundamentally novel view of learning as control minimization, while sidestepping biologically unrealistic assumptions.
Researcher Affiliation Academia 1Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Z urich and ETH Z urich, Switzerland. Correspondence to: Alexander Meulemans <ameulema@ethz.ch>.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1 Pseudocode for the Strong-DFC algorithm on a single input sample
Open Source Code Yes Source code for all experiments is available at: https:// github.com/mariacer/strong_dfc.
Open Datasets Yes We confirm the above results for the idealized setting on the MNIST dataset (Le Cun et al., 2010) (Table 1). Here we also observe that both the original training loss L and the surrogate loss H reach low values, which in turn translates into high testing accuracy.
Dataset Splits Yes We optimize the hyperparameters of each method independently, for best performance on a validation set of 5000 datapoints.
Hardware Specification No The paper does not provide specific hardware details (e.g., GPU/CPU models, memory) used for running its experiments. It mentions 'conventional deep learning hardware' but no specifics.
Software Dependencies No The paper does not provide specific software dependency versions (e.g., Python 3.8, PyTorch 1.9). It describes the algorithms and their implementation but omits specific software versions.
Experiment Setup Yes We optimize the hyperparameters of each method independently, for best performance on a validation set of 5000 datapoints. We use BP to train a noiseless network, and DFC to train both a noiseless and a noisy network, where we add noise to the dynamics according to Eq. (8).