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Real brains follow Dale's principle: a neuron can either excite its neighbors or suppress them, but never both. Standard deep learning ignores this and uses backpropagation. In our new paper, Diffusing Blame, we fix this disconnect. By introducing a routing method that broadcasts error signals directly to the hidden layers, we can train networks made of dedicated positive and negative neurons to strictly obey Dale's principle, all without relying on backprop! This method works surprisingly well on image recognition tasks despite the strict biological constraints. We also achieved competitive, backprop-free reinforcement learning on complex locomotion tasks and the open-ended Craftax environment. It is neat to see that representation learning remains possible even when we force deep learning to play by the rules of real neurons.
Introducing "Diffusing Blame": can a neural network learn competitively while strictly obeying Dale's principle, the rule that real neurons follow? We show it can, across both image classification and reinforcement learning. 🧠 Accepted at #ALIFE2026 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31700 Real neurons generally follow Dale’s principle: each neuron is predominantly excitatory or inhibitory. Standard artificial networks usually ignore this constraint, allowing every unit to mix positive and negative outgoing weights. Backprop makes the gap even wider. Its backward pass needs exact transposed copies of the forward weights, the so-called "weight transport problem,” which biology doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for. So we asked: can a network that strictly enforces Dale's principle still learn well, without weight transport? Our approach builds on Error Diffusion (ED), a local rule that routes a single global error signal directly to every hidden unit, where each layer is split into separate excitatory and inhibitory streams with four non-negative weight matrices, so a synapse's sign comes from fixed population identity rather than a learnable weight. Our main contribution is to extend ED from binary to multi-class problems via modulo error routing. We then asked whether this routing mechanism could provide useful credit signals in the noisy setting of reinforcement learning. During PPO training on Ant, Humanoid, and HalfCheetah, we compared each local ED update with the corresponding true backpropagation gradient. Among the routing schemes we tested, modulo routing consistently produced the strongest alignment. Taken together, these results show that Dale-constrained networks can still learn without transporting weights backward, suggesting a potential path toward learning rules that are both effective and more biologically plausible.
Real brains follow Dale's principle: a neuron can either excite its neighbors or suppress them, but never both. Standard deep learning ignores this and uses backpropagation. In our new paper, Diffusing Blame, we fix this disconnect. By introducing a routing method that broadcasts error signals directly to the hidden layers, we can train networks made of dedicated positive and negative neurons to strictly obey Dale's principle, all without relying on backprop! This method works surprisingly well on image recognition tasks despite the strict biological constraints. We also achieved competitive, backprop-free reinforcement learning on complex locomotion tasks and the open-ended Craftax environment. It is neat to see that representation learning remains possible even when we force deep learning to play by the rules of real neurons.
Introducing "Diffusing Blame": can a neural network learn competitively while strictly obeying Dale's principle, the rule that real neurons follow? We show it can, across both image classification and reinforcement learning. 🧠 Accepted at #ALIFE2026 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31700 Real neurons generally follow Dale’s principle: each neuron is predominantly excitatory or inhibitory. Standard artificial networks usually ignore this constraint, allowing every unit to mix positive and negative outgoing weights. Backprop makes the gap even wider. Its backward pass needs exact transposed copies of the forward weights, the so-called "weight transport problem,” which biology doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for. So we asked: can a network that strictly enforces Dale's principle still learn well, without weight transport? Our approach builds on Error Diffusion (ED), a local rule that routes a single global error signal directly to every hidden unit, where each layer is split into separate excitatory and inhibitory streams with four non-negative weight matrices, so a synapse's sign comes from fixed population identity rather than a learnable weight. Our main contribution is to extend ED from binary to multi-class problems via modulo error routing. We then asked whether this routing mechanism could provide useful credit signals in the noisy setting of reinforcement learning. During PPO training on Ant, Humanoid, and HalfCheetah, we compared each local ED update with the corresponding true backpropagation gradient. Among the routing schemes we tested, modulo routing consistently produced the strongest alignment. Taken together, these results show that Dale-constrained networks can still learn without transporting weights backward, suggesting a potential path toward learning rules that are both effective and more biologically plausible.
Diffusing Blame: Task-Dependent Credit Assignment in Biologically Plausible Dual-Stream Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31700