Biological Plausibility and Representational Alignment of Feedback Alignment in Convolutional Networks

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Biological Plausibility and Representational Alignment of Feedback Alignment in Convolutional Networks Jake Lance, Larry Kieu The feedback alignment (FA) algorithm offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks yet notably fails to scale to convolutional architectures. Modifications have been proposed to address this limitation, but at questionable cost to biological plausibility. In this paper, we evaluate five learning algorithms including modified FA and standard BP, applied to the same convolutional architecture with the CIFAR-10 dataset. We provide a tripartite comparative analysis focusing on biological plausibility, interpretability, and computational complexity. Our results indicate that modified FA algorithms converge on internal representations that are structurally similar to those produced by backpropagation. In particular, it appears the functional success of modified FA algorithms may be rooted in their ability to mimic the representational geometry of backpropagation, converging on similar representations despite relying on fundamentally different weight update mechanisms. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2605.08564 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.08564v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.08564 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Larry Kieu [view email] [v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 23:54:48 UTC (1,614 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.CV cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)