Learning without feedback: Direct random target projection as a feedback-alignment algorithm with layerwise feedforward training

While the backpropagation of error algorithm allowed for a rapid rise in the development and deployment of artificial neural networks, two key issues currently preclude biological plausibility: (i) symmetry is required between forward and backward weights, which is known as the weight transport problem, and (ii) updates are locked before both the forward and backward passes have been completed. There is thus a growing interest in the development of training algorithms that release these constraints and ensure locality in both parameters and error signals while minimizing the training performance penalty. The feedback alignment (FA) algorithm uses fixed random feedback weights and shows that the network learns to align its forward and backward weights to maximize error gradient information. The direct feedback alignment (DFA) variation directly propagates the output error to each hidden layer through fixed random connectivity matrices. In this work, we show that using only the error sign is sufficient to maintain feedback alignment and to provide learning in the hidden layers. As in classification problems the error sign information is already contained in the targets (i.e. one-hot-encoded labels), using the latter as a proxy for the error brings three advantages: (i) it solves the weight transport problem by eliminating the requirement for an explicit feedback pathway, which also reduces the computational workload, (ii) it reduces memory requirements by removing update locking, allowing for weight updates to be computed in each layer independently without requiring a full forward pass, and (iii) it leads to a purely feedforward and low-cost algorithm that only requires a label-dependent random vector selection to estimate the layerwise loss gradients. Therefore, in this work, we propose the direct random target projection (DRTP) algorithm and demonstrate on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets that, despite the absence of an explicit error feedback, DRTP can still lie cl