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Maxence Ernoult

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5 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning long range dependencies through time reversal symmetry breaking

Guillaume Pourcel
Maxence Ernoult

Deep State Space Models (SSMs) reignite physics-grounded compute paradigms, as RNNs could natively be embodied into dynamical systems. This calls for dedicated learning algorithms obeying to core physical principles, with efficient techniques to simulate these systems and guide their design. We propose \emph{Recurrent Hamiltonian Echo Learning} (RHEL), an algorithm which provably computes loss gradients as finite differences of physical trajectories of non-dissipative, \emph{Hamiltonian systems}. In ML terms, RHEL only requires three ``forward passes'' irrespective of model size, without explicit Jacobian computation, nor incurring any variance in the gradient estimation. Motivated by the potential to implement our algorithm in non-digital physical systems, we first introduce RHEL in \emph{continuous time} and demonstrate its formal equivalence with the continuous adjoint state method. To facilitate the simulation of Hamiltonian systems trained by RHEL, we propose a \emph{discrete-time} version of RHEL which is equivalent to Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) when applied to a class of recurrent modules which we call \emph{Hamiltonian Recurrent Units} (HRUs). This setting allows us to demonstrate the scalability of RHEL by generalizing these results to hierarchies of HRUs, which we call \emph{Hamiltonian SSMs} (HSSMs). We apply RHEL to train HSSMs with linear and nonlinear dynamics on a variety of time-series tasks ranging from mid-range to long-range classification and regression with sequence length reaching $\sim 50k$. We show that RHEL consistently matches the performance of BPTT across all models and tasks. This work opens new doors for the design of scalable, energy-efficient physical systems endowed with self-learning capabilities for sequence modelling.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Towards training digitally-tied analog blocks via hybrid gradient computation

Timothy Nest
Maxence Ernoult

Power efficiency is plateauing in the standard digital electronics realm such that new hardware, models, and algorithms are needed to reduce the costs of AI training. The combination of energy-based analog circuits and the Equilibrium Propagation (EP) algorithm constitutes a compelling alternative compute paradigm for gradient-based optimization of neural nets. Existing analog hardware accelerators, however, typically incorporate digital circuitry to sustain auxiliary non-weight-stationary operations, mitigate analog device imperfections, and leverage existing digital platforms. Such heterogeneous hardware lacks a supporting theoretical framework. In this work, we introduce \emph{Feedforward-tied Energy-based Models} (ff-EBMs), a hybrid model comprised of feedforward and energy-based blocks housed on digital and analog circuits. We derive a novel algorithm to compute gradients end-to-end in ff-EBMs by backpropagating and ``eq-propagating'' through feedforward and energy-based parts respectively, enabling EP to be applied flexibly on realistic architectures. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on ff-EBMs using Deep Hopfield Networks (DHNs) as energy-based blocks, and show that a standard DHN can be arbitrarily split into any uniform size while maintaining or improving performance with increases in simulation speed of up to four times. We then train ff-EBMs on ImageNet32 where we establish a new state-of-the-art performance for the EP literature (46 top-1 \%). Our approach offers a principled, scalable, and incremental roadmap for the gradual integration of self-trainable analog computational primitives into existing digital accelerators.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

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

Benjamin Scellier
Maxence Ernoult
Jack Kendall
Suhas Kumar

Energy-based learning algorithms have recently gained a surge of interest due to their compatibility with analog (post-digital) hardware. Existing algorithms include contrastive learning (CL), equilibrium propagation (EP) and coupled learning (CpL), all consisting in contrasting two states, and differing in the type of perturbation used to obtain the second state from the first one. However, these algorithms have never been explicitly compared on equal footing with same models and datasets, making it difficult to assess their scalability and decide which one to select in practice. In this work, we carry out a comparison of seven learning algorithms, namely CL and different variants of EP and CpL depending on the signs of the perturbations. Specifically, using these learning algorithms, we train deep convolutional Hopfield networks (DCHNs) on five vision tasks (MNIST, F-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100). We find that, while all algorithms yield comparable performance on MNIST, important differences in performance arise as the difficulty of the task increases. Our key findings reveal that negative perturbations are better than positive ones, and highlight the centered variant of EP (which uses two perturbations of opposite sign) as the best-performing algorithm. We also endorse these findings with theoretical arguments. Additionally, we establish new SOTA results with DCHNs on all five datasets, both in performance and speed. In particular, our DCHN simulations are 13. 5 times faster with respect to Laborieux et al. (2021), which we achieve thanks to the use of a novel energy minimisation algorithm based on asynchronous updates, combined with reduced precision (16 bits).

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Towards Scaling Difference Target Propagation by Learning Backprop Targets

Maxence Ernoult
Fabrice Normandin
Abhinav Moudgil
Sean Spinney
Eugene Belilovsky
Irina Rish
Blake A. Richards
Yoshua Bengio

The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains. As such, it is important to explore learning algorithms that come with strong theoretical guarantees and can match the performance of backpropagation (BP) on complex tasks. One such algorithm is Difference Target Propagation (DTP), a biologically-plausible learning algorithm whose close relation with Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization has been recently established. However, the conditions under which this connection rigorously holds preclude layer-wise training of the feedback pathway synaptic weights (which is more biologically plausible). Moreover, good alignment between DTP weight updates and loss gradients is only loosely guaranteed and under very specific conditions for the architecture being trained. In this paper, we propose a novel feedback weight training scheme that ensures both that DTP approximates BP and that layer-wise feedback weight training can be restored without sacrificing any theoretical guarantees. Our theory is corroborated by experimental results and we report the best performance ever achieved by DTP on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32x32.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

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

Maxence Ernoult
Julie Grollier
Damien Querlioz
Yoshua Bengio
Benjamin Scellier

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 steady state. Training convergent RNNs consists in adjusting the weights until the steady state of output neurons coincides with a target y. Convergent RNNs can also be trained with the more conventional Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. In its original formulation EP was described in the case of real-time neuronal dynamics, which is computationally costly. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time version of EP with simplified equations and with reduced simulation time, bringing EP closer to practical machine learning tasks. We first prove theoretically, as well as numerically that the neural and weight updates of EP, computed by forward-time dynamics, are step-by-step equal to the ones obtained by BPTT, with gradients computed backward in time. The equality is strict when the transition function of the dynamics derives from a primitive function and the steady state is maintained long enough. We then show for more standard discrete-time neural network dynamics that the same property is approximately respected and we subsequently demonstrate training with EP with equivalent performance to BPTT. In particular, we define the first convolutional architecture trained with EP achieving ∼ 1% test error on MNIST, which is the lowest error reported with EP. These results can guide the development of deep neural networks trained with EP.

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