Forward Target Propagation: A Forward-Only Approach to Global Error Credit Assignment via Local Losses

Excerpt

arXiv:2506.11030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training neural networks has traditionally relied on backpropagation (BP), a gradient-based algorithm that, despite its widespread success, suffers from key limitations in both biological and hardware perspectives. These include backward error propagation by symmetric weights, non-local credit assignment, and frozen activity during backward passes. We propose Forward Target Propagation (FTP), a biologically plausible and computationally efficie