Title: Advancing Supervised Local Learning Beyond Classification with Long-term Feature Bank
Primary area: learning on time series and dynamical systems
Keywords: local learning

Abstract: Local learning offers an alternative to traditional end-to-end back-propagation in deep neural networks, significantly reducing GPU memory consumption. Although it has shown promise in image classification tasks, its extension to other visual tasks has been limited. This limitation arises primarily from two factors: 1) architectures designed specifically for classification are not readily adaptable to other tasks, which prevents the effective reuse of task-specific knowledge from architectures tailored to different problems;2) these classification-focused architectures typically lack cross-scale feature communication, leading to degraded performance in tasks like object detection and super-resolution.
To address these challenges, we propose the Feature Bank Augmented auxiliary network (FBA), which introduces a simplified design principle and incorporates a feature bank to enhance cross-task adaptability and communication. 
This work presents the first task-agnostic framework that extends supervised local learning beyond classification to a broad range of visual tasks, demonstrating that FBA not only conserves GPU memory but also achieves performance on par with end-to-end approaches across multiple datasets for various visual tasks.