Deepity: A C++ library showing Predictive Coding Networks can match Backprop (97.73% on MNIST in 60s) [P]

[u/Important-Home4431]

I've spent the last month building a local C++ machine learning library called Deepity to test alternative credit assignment algorithms; specifically Predictive Coding Networks (PCNs). While PCNs are fascinating for biological plausibility and continual learning, naive implementations are painfully slow.

By implementing recent research (Accelerated PCNs via Direct Kolen-Pollack Feedback Alignment) and utilizing algorithmic caching to bypass redundant forward projections during the inference settling phase, I managed to close the performance gap with backpropagation on my CPU when training on MNIST (50 epochs).

• PyTorch Backprop (Feedforward): 98.27% test accuracy in ~70s.
• Deepity DKPPCN: 97.73% test accuracy in 59.5s.

Next up is porting these kernels to CUDA to scale up the architecture and testing its capabilities in continual learning scenarios where standard backprop struggles.

If you are interested in local learning, alternative credit assignment, or HPC for ML, I'd love your feedback!

• GitHub: https://github.com/ra4ster/deepity
• Project Site: https://ra4ster.github.io/Deepity

[u/IntelArtiGen]

Competing with backprop on ILSVRC (the full version) would be a substantial next step I'd say. Many algorithms managed to compete with backprop on MNIST, but never went much further.

[u/Important-Home4431 → u/IntelArtiGen]

Spot on. That’s exactly what I’ll be testing on while moving to CUDA!