arXiv:2508.09787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Proto-PINV+H, a fast training paradigm that combines closed-form weight computation with gradient-based optimisation of a small set of synthetic inputs, soft labels, and-crucially-hidden activations. At each iteration we recompute all weight matrices in closed form via two (or more) ridge-regularised pseudo-inverse solves, while updating only the prototypes with Adam. The trainable degrees of freedom are thus shifted from weight space to data/activation space. On MNIST (60k train, 10k test) and Fashion-MNIST (60k train, 10k test), our method reaches 97.8% and 89.3% test accuracy on the official 10k test sets, respectively, in 3.9s--4.5s using approximately 130k trainable parameters and only 250 epochs on an RTX 5060 (16GB). We provide a multi-layer extension (optimised activations at each hidden stage), learnable ridge parameters, optional PCA/PLS projections, and theory linking the condition number of prototype matrices to generalisation. The approach yields favourable accuracy--speed--size trade-offs against ELM, random-feature ridge, and shallow MLPs trained by back-propagation.