Attention-gated brain propagation: How the brain can implement reward-based error backpropagation

Much recent work has focused on biologically plausible variants of supervised learning algorithms. However, there is no teacher in the motor cortex that instructs the motor neurons and learning in the brain depends on reward and punishment. We demonstrate a biologically plausible reinforcement learning scheme for deep networks with an arbitrary number of layers. The network chooses an action by selecting a unit in the output layer and uses feedback connections to assign credit to the units in successively lower layers that are responsible for this action. After the choice, the network receives reinforcement and there is no teacher correcting the errors. We show how the new learning scheme – Attention-Gated Brain Propagation (BrainProp) – is mathematically equivalent to error backpropagation, for one output unit at a time. We demonstrate successful learning of deep fully connected, convolutional and locally connected networks on classical and hard image-classification benchmarks; MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet. BrainProp achieves an accuracy that is equivalent to that of standard error-backpropagation, and better than state-of-the-art biologically inspired learning schemes. Additionally, the trial-and-error nature of learning is associated with limited additional training time so that BrainProp is a factor of 1-3.5 times slower. Our results thereby provide new insights into how deep learning may be implemented in the brain.