Nature study finds synaptic plasticity in biological neural networks approximates backpropagation
aran_nayebi · x · 2026-10-04
MIT researcher Aran Nayebi discusses a 2025 Nature study by Francioni et al. reporting experimental evidence that biological neural networks implement learning rules approximating backpropagation — which he calls the best evidence yet of successful learning algorithms in biology.
His team introduced the first bio-plausible learning rules that scale like backprop in 2020, and even after searching over learning-rule primitives, none beat backprop. Rules matching its performance also produced representations closest to the brain's IT cortex.
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