papers

Publications (19)

cs.LG2021

A deep learning theory for neural networks grounded in physics

Benjamin Scellier

In the last decade, deep learning has become a major component of artificial intelligence. The workhorse of deep learning is the optimization of loss functions by stochastic gradie…

cs.LG2026

Training a Predictive Coding Network on ImageNet using Equilibrium Propagation

Tugdual Kerjan, Rasmus Høier, Benjamin Scellier

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a physics-based training framework that has primarily been employed in energy-based models, including continuous Hopfield networks, nonlinear resist…

physics.app-ph2024

Training of Physical Neural Networks

Ali Momeni, Babak Rahmani, Benjamin Scellier +25

Physical neural networks (PNNs) are a class of neural-like networks that leverage the properties of physical systems to perform computation. While PNNs are so far a niche research…

cs.NE2020

Equilibrium Propagation with Continual Weight Updates

Maxence Ernoult, Julie Grollier, Damien Querlioz +2

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a learning algorithm that bridges Machine Learning and Neuroscience, by computing gradients closely matching those of Backpropagation Through Time (…

quant-ph2024

Quantum Equilibrium Propagation: Gradient-Descent Training of Quantum Systems

Benjamin Scellier

Equilibrium propagation (EP) is a training framework for energy-based systems, i.e. systems whose physics minimizes an energy function. EP has been explored in various classical ph…

cs.NE2020

Continual Weight Updates and Convolutional Architectures for Equilibrium Propagation

Maxence Ernoult, Julie Grollier, Damien Querlioz +2

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically inspired alternative algorithm to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks. It applies to RNNs fed by a static input x that…

cs.LG2022

Agnostic Physics-Driven Deep Learning

Benjamin Scellier, Siddhartha Mishra, Yoshua Bengio +1

This work establishes that a physical system can perform statistical learning without gradient computations, via an Agnostic Equilibrium Propagation (Aeqprop) procedure that combin…

cs.LG2021

Scaling Equilibrium Propagation to Deep ConvNets by Drastically Reducing its Gradient Estimator Bias

Axel Laborieux, Maxence Ernoult, Benjamin Scellier +3

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically-inspired counterpart of Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) which, owing to its strong theoretical guarantees and the locality in spa…

cs.NE2020

Scaling Equilibrium Propagation to Deep ConvNets by Drastically Reducing its Gradient Estimator Bias

Axel Laborieux, Maxence Ernoult, Benjamin Scellier +3

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically-inspired algorithm for convergent RNNs with a local learning rule that comes with strong theoretical guarantees. The parameter update…

cs.LG2025

A universal approximation theorem for nonlinear resistive networks

Benjamin Scellier, Siddhartha Mishra

Resistor networks have recently been studied as analog computing platforms for machine learning, particularly due to their compatibility with the Equilibrium Propagation training f…

cs.LG2023

Energy-based learning algorithms for analog computing: a comparative study

Benjamin Scellier, Maxence Ernoult, Jack Kendall +1

Energy-based learning algorithms have recently gained a surge of interest due to their compatibility with analog (post-digital) hardware. Existing algorithms include contrastive le…

cs.LG2018

Equivalence of Equilibrium Propagation and Recurrent Backpropagation

Benjamin Scellier, Yoshua Bengio

Recurrent Backpropagation and Equilibrium Propagation are supervised learning algorithms for fixed point recurrent neural networks which differ in their second phase. In the first…

cs.ET2024

A Fast Algorithm to Simulate Nonlinear Resistive Networks

Benjamin Scellier

Analog electrical networks have long been investigated as energy-efficient computing platforms for machine learning, leveraging analog physics during inference. More recently, resi…

cs.LG2018

Generalization of Equilibrium Propagation to Vector Field Dynamics

Benjamin Scellier, Anirudh Goyal, Jonathan Binas +2

The biological plausibility of the backpropagation algorithm has long been doubted by neuroscientists. Two major reasons are that neurons would need to send two different types of…

cs.LG2017

Equilibrium Propagation: Bridging the Gap Between Energy-Based Models and Backpropagation

Benjamin Scellier, Yoshua Bengio

We introduce Equilibrium Propagation, a learning framework for energy-based models. It involves only one kind of neural computation, performed in both the first phase (when the pre…

cs.LG2016

Feedforward Initialization for Fast Inference of Deep Generative Networks is biologically plausible

Yoshua Bengio, Benjamin Scellier, Olexa Bilaniuk +2

We consider deep multi-layered generative models such as Boltzmann machines or Hopfield nets in which computation (which implements inference) is both recurrent and stochastic, but…

cond-mat.dis-nn2025

Temporal Contrastive Learning through implicit non-equilibrium memory

Martin J. Falk, Adam T. Strupp, Benjamin Scellier +1

The backpropagation method has enabled transformative uses of neural networks. Alternatively, for energy-based models, local learning methods involving only nearby neurons offer be…

cs.LG2019

Updates of Equilibrium Prop Match Gradients of Backprop Through Time in an RNN with Static Input

Maxence Ernoult, Julie Grollier, Damien Querlioz +2

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically inspired learning algorithm for convergent recurrent neural networks, i.e. RNNs that are fed by a static input x and settle to a stea…

cs.NE2020

Training End-to-End Analog Neural Networks with Equilibrium Propagation

Jack Kendall, Ross Pantone, Kalpana Manickavasagam +2

We introduce a principled method to train end-to-end analog neural networks by stochastic gradient descent. In these analog neural networks, the weights to be adjusted are implemen…