Comment by tyromaniac
1 day ago
Also has the "advantage" of being slightly more biologically plausible as the optimization happens locally rather than globally.
That idea was taken further by N'dri et al in PCL, in which "activation energy" was minimized as well, and inhibitory neurons added https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64234-z.pdf
While trying to find the link for that I stumbled upon
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12732
Which also looks pretty interesting
I think this is the main thing I want out of "non-backprop ML" research - figuring out how the whole class of algorithms behaves. And then applying that to figure out how the brain implements its own deep learning.
If we can figure out how the brain's learning dynamics function well enough? We could figure out how to interface with them and extend them.