An Educated Guess: Deriving Statistically Aligned Gradient Estimates for Zeroth-Order Optimisation

arXiv:2611.08712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As novel hardware architectures are explored for the purposes of machine learning, including neuromorphic chips, asynchronous systems, and ASICs, effective learning algorithms are highly desirable. While backpropagation is the standard for differentiation on standard hardware, its requirement for global synchrony and exact differentiability limits the exploration of exotic algorithms on non-traditional substrates and devices.