How Important is Weight Symmetry in Backpropagation?

TitleHow Important is Weight Symmetry in Backpropagation?
Publication TypeCBMM Memos
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsLiao, Q, Leibo, JZ, Poggio, T
Date Published11/29/2015
Abstract

Gradient backpropagation (BP) requires symmetric feedforward and feedback connections—the same weights must be used for forward and backward passes. This “weight transport problem” [1] is thought to be one of the main reasons of BP’s biological implausibility. Using 15 different classification datasets, we systematically study to what extent BP really depends on weight symmetry. In a study that turned out to be surprisingly similar in spirit to Lillicrap et al.’s demonstration [2] but orthogonal in its results, our experiments indicate that: (1) the magnitudes of feedback weights do not matter to performance (2) the signs of feedback weights do matter—the more concordant signs between feedforward and their corresponding feedback connections, the better (3) with feedback weights having random magnitudes and 100% concordant signs, we were able to achieve the same or even better performance than SGD. (4) some normalizations/stabilizations are indispensable for such asymmetric BP to work, namely Batch Normalization (BN) [3] and/or a “Batch Manhattan” (BM) update rule.

arXiv

http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05067

DSpace@MIT

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100797

Download:  PDF icon 1510.05067v3.pdf
CBMM Memo No:  036

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