arXiv:2606.11123cs.LG2026-06被引 1

解决反馈对齐训练中梯度维度下降问题,提升深层网络性能

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

  • 用正交化更新和激活归一化提升反馈对齐的梯度维度
  • 在ResNet-18上使CIFAR100准确率提升9个百分点
  • 适合研究替代反向传播算法的学者参考

反向传播(BP)因需前向与反馈权重互为转置而被认为缺乏生物学合理性。反馈对齐(FA)通过固定随机反馈权重实现学习,使前向权重与反馈权重对齐,从而近似标准梯度。然而,该方法在深层网络中表现不佳。我们研究了在CIFAR10上训练的BP与FA模型,发现FA的误差信号有效秩显著降低,限制了参数空间的探索。为此,我们评估了两种提升有效维度的方法:Muon优化器(正交化权重更新)和隐藏层激活归一化(促进激活正交性)。在更大架构与基准测试中,这些方法持续优于基础FA,例如在使用ResNet-18的CIFAR100上,准确率提升9个百分点。结果表明,低维梯度动态是阻碍FA扩展的关键障碍,而增强更新几何的高维性是替代反向传播的有效路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

反馈对齐深度学习优化器梯度维度

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