Interpreting learning in biological neural networks as zero-order optimization method

Recently, significant progress has been made regarding the statistical understanding of artificial neural networks (ANNs). ANNs are motivated by the functioning of the brain, but differ in several crucial aspects. In particular, it is biologically implausible that the learning of the brain is based on gradient descent. In this work we look at the brain as a statistical method for supervised learning. The main contribution is to relate the local updating rule of the connection parameters in biological neural networks (BNNs) to a zero-order optimization method.