# Extension of Direct Feedback Alignment to Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Network for Bio-plausible Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12830 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12830/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Training of Physical Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03372/) (2024)
- [Brain-Inspired Machine Intelligence: A Survey of Neurobiologically-Plausible Credit Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09257/) (2023)
- [A Robust Backpropagation-Free Framework for Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01820/) (2022)
- [M2RU: Memristive Minion Recurrent Unit for On-Chip Continual Learning at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17299/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Throughout this paper, we focus on the improvement of the direct feedback alignment (DFA) algorithm and extend the usage of the DFA to convolutional and recurrent neural networks (CNNs and RNNs). Even though the DFA algorithm is biologically plausible and has a potential of high-speed training, it has not been considered as the substitute for back-propagation (BP) due to the low accuracy in the CNN and RNN training. In this work, we propose a new DFA algorithm for BP-level accurate CNN and RNN training. Firstly, we divide the network into several modules and apply the DFA algorithm within the module. Second, the DFA with the sparse backward weight is applied. It comes with a form of dilated convolution in the CNN case, and in a form of sparse matrix multiplication in the RNN case. Additionally, the error propagation method of CNN becomes simpler through the group convolution. Finally, hybrid DFA increases the accuracy of the CNN and RNN training to the BP-level while taking advantage of the parallelism and hardware efficiency of the DFA algorithm.