Error backpropagation is a highly effective mechanism for learning
high-quality hierarchical features in deep networks. Updating the features or
weights in one layer, however, requires waiting for the propagation of error
signals from higher layers. Learning using delayed and non-local errors makes
it hard to reconcile backpropagation with the learning mechanisms observed in
biological neural networks as it requires the neurons to maintain a memory of
the input long enough until the higher-layer errors arrive. In this paper, we
propose an alternative learning mechanism where errors are generated locally in
each layer using fixed, random auxiliary classifiers. Lower layers could thus
be trained independently of higher layers and training could either proceed
layer by layer, or simultaneously in all layers using local error information.
We address biological plausibility concerns such as weight symmetry
requirements and show that the proposed learning mechanism based on fixed,
broad, and random tuning of each neuron to the classification categories
outperforms the biologically-motivated feedback alignment learning technique on
the MNIST, CIFAR10, and SVHN datasets, approaching the performance of standard
backpropagation. Our approach highlights a potential biological mechanism for
the supervised, or task-dependent, learning of feature hierarchies. In
addition, we show that it is well suited for learning deep networks in custom
hardware where it can drastically reduce memory traffic and data communication
overheads.

本文提出通过引入本地误差和随机辅助分类器来优化深度网络中的学习机制，旨在解决反向传播算法中存在的反应延迟和与生物神经网络的学习机制的矛盾。实验证明，该方法效果优于反馈对齐学习技术，并强调了其潜在的生物学机制和在定制硬件上的应用前景。