Sakana AI’s Error Diffusion Trains Dale-Compliant Dual-Stream Networks, Reaching 96.7% MNIST and 61.7% CIFAR-10 Without Backpropagation

Backpropagation relies on weight transport, which biological circuits likely cannot implement. Sakana AI's Error Diffusion sidesteps that constraint, training dual-stream excitatory/inhibitory networks that obey Dale's principle.

This piece breaks down how modulo error routing scales the rule from MNIST to CIFAR-10 and reinforcement learning, and what its task-dependent ablations reveal. The post Sakana AI’s Error Diffusion Trains Dale-Compliant Dual-Stream Networks, Reaching 96. 7% MNIST and 61.