Backpropagation-free training of deep physical neural networks

Recent successes in deep learning for vision and natural language processing are attributed to larger models but come with energy consumption and scalability issues. Current training of digital deep-learning models primarily relies on backpropagation that is unsuitable for physical implementation. In this work, we propose a simple deep neural network architecture augmented by a physical local learning (PhyLL) algorithm, which enables supervised and unsupervised training of deep physical neural networks without detailed knowledge of the nonlinear physical layer’s properties. We trained diverse wave-based physical neural networks in vowel and image classification experiments, showcasing the universality of our approach. Our method shows advantages over other hardware-aware training schemes by improving training speed, enhancing robustness, and reducing power consumption by eliminating the need for system modeling and thus decreasing digital computation.