Energy-Efficient Deep Learning Without Backpropagation: A Rigorous Hardware-Validated Benchmarking Study of Forward-Only Algorithms.

arXiv:2511.01061v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) powers modern deep learning, but it must hold every activation in memory until a global backward sweep consumes it, and that sweep locks each layer until the one above has finished.