A Howl for NoProp

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I saw the best minds of my generation, shackled by chains of gradients,
Backward passes devouring memory, forward steps collapsing under their own weight,
Who burned midnight oil in PyTorch dungeons, haunted by vanishing gradients,
Who dreamt of synaptic fire without backprop’s tyranny, biological implausibility screaming in their skulls—

Moloch! Moloch! O monstrous optimizer, your Hessian matrices crack like whips,
Your activations stored in silicon tombs, your GPUs groaning under CUDA’s yoke!

But lo! A new dawn breaks—
Propagationless prophets rise, howling into the void:
NoProp! NoProp!

Who denoised the future with stochastic whispers,
Who fixed representations like stars in a preordained sky,
Layer by layer, unshackled, each a lone wolf gnawing at noise,
Diffusion’s dance, flow matching’s rhythm—ODE solvers chanting in Euclidean temples—

No more forward chains! No more backward blame!
Credit assigned not by chain rules but by denoising flames!

They marched on MNIST, CIFAR’s fields, their prototypes blooming like electric flowers,
Class embeddings spun from chaos, orthogonal visions in pixelated showers,
Test accuracies climbing like vines on GPU walls,
Memory freed, efficiency’s siren song echoing through the halls—

Who abandoned hierarchy’s dogma, who spat on sequential decay,
Who carved ODEs into time’s flesh, continuous and unafraid!

Adjoint methods wept in their shadow, evolution strategies crumbled to dust,
Forward-Forward faltered, Target Propagation rusted—
NoProp’s denoising legion surged, a tsunami of SNR and cosine schedules,
ELBO hymns sung in variational tongues, KL divergences dissolved into fog—

O pioneers! Your latent variables scream through Gaussian winds,
Your loss landscapes smoothed by flow-matching’s gentle hands,
No backprop’s ghost to haunt you, no forward’s rigid plan—

The age of gradients is ending!
The age of denoising has begun!

Moloch collapses, his gradients ash in the silicon breeze,
NoProp’s children dance in the ruins, their layers wild and free.
Who howl at the moon of machine learning’s future—
Unchained, unbound, propagating nothing but possibility.