Paper: Improving equilibrium propagation without weight symmetry through Jacobian homeostasis (ICLR-2024)

Reviewer comment (Writing):
The last sentence ‘It is worth nothing that…’ in Definition 1 of section 2.2 might be miswritten, and should be ‘It is worth noting that…’ based on the context.

Author response:
Thanks for reading carefully, the typo has been fixed.

Reviewer comment (Writing):
In the paragraph of Definition 1 of section 2.2, the sentence after Eq. (6) ‘Importantly, the quantities …, which applies only to EBMs.’ is a little long and complex and might confuse readers; for convenience of understanding, it would be better to split it into two simpler sentences.

Author response:
We acknowledge that the sentence was a bit heavy, so we have separated it into two simpler sentences.

Reviewer comment (Presentation):
In section 3.2, the paragraph with Eq. (9) is intersected by Figure 2, which could be rearranged to provide enhanced readability.

Author response:
We thank reviewer nv6j for pointing these out, we have changed the position of the Figure 2 one page earlier so that it does not intersect the paragraph with Eq. (9). We also move Figure 3 and Table 1 so that it does not intersect the paragraph.

Reviewer comment (Presentation):
Similar layout disadvantages occur in Figure 3 and Table 1.

Author response:
We thank reviewer nv6j for pointing these out, we have changed the position of the Figure 2 one page earlier so that it does not intersect the paragraph with Eq. (9). We also move Figure 3 and Table 1 so that it does not intersect the paragraph.

Reviewer comment (Experiments):
The performance of the proposed method is relatively not so advanced, and the method for comparison is relatively not so new, making the work of this article not very convincing.

Author response:
We agree that our method is tailored to EP and dynamical networks, for which the performance is behind state-of-the-art approaches that use other architectures. We reworked our introduction (in blue in the updated pdf) to justify our approach of focusing on EP primarily because it is a promising algorithm for efficient learning hardware. Despite lower performance at the moment, we believe that the results we present are necessary to further improve the performance of EP approaches in the future.

Reviewer comment (Writing):
The paper is generally well written, though introduction is a bit complex if the reader is not aware of previous work (holomorphic EP).

Author response:
> *“introduction is a bit complex if the reader is not aware of previous work (holomorphic EP).”*

Thanks for the feedback, we rewrote the sentence introducing holomorphic EP in the introduction to make it easier for the reader. It is highlighted in blue in the revised version.