{"paper":{"title":"Conditioned Direct Feedback Alignment via Activity and Error Geometry","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.NE","q-bio.NC"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Bernardo L. Sabatini, Houman Safaai, Varun Reddy","submitted_at":"2026-07-20T23:15:36Z","abstract_excerpt":"Direct feedback alignment (DFA) trains hidden layers with fixed random projections of the output error, avoiding the transposed-weight backward pass of backpropagation (BP). We study a failure mode of DFA training that is distinct from feedback quality: the local weight update is calculated by an outer product, so anisotropy can enter through either its presynaptic-activity factor or its local-error factor. Our analyses with controlled synthetic regimes isolate the first failure mode and show an approximately 40-percentage-point activity-conditioning gain when high-variance directions contain "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.18574","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.18574/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}