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Everything about Vanishing gradient problem

Machine learning model training problem

In machine learning, the vanishing gradient problem is the problem of greatly diverging gradient magnitudes between earlier and later layers encountered when training neural networks with backpropagation. In such methods, neural network weights are updated proportional to their partial derivative of the loss function. As the number of forward propagation steps in a network increases, for instance due to greater network depth, the gradients of earlier weights are calculated with increasingly many multiplications. These multiplications shrink the gradient magnitude. Consequently, the gradients of earlier weights will be exponentially smaller than the gradients of later weights. This difference in gradient magnitude might introduce instability in the training process, slow it, or halt it entirely. For instance, consider the hyperbolic tangent activation function. The gradients of this function are in range [0,1]. The product of repeated multiplication with such gradients decreases exponentially. The inverse problem, when weight gradients at earlier layers get exponentially larger, is called the exploding gradient problem. Wikipedia →

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  2. Skim a recent paper: The vanishing gradient problem for stiff neural differential equationsInfluential work since 2022
  3. Pick up a classic book: Neural networksThe most-reprinted book on the subject
  4. Read the landmark paper: The Vanishing Gradient Problem During Learning Recurrent Neural Nets and Problem SolutionsCited 2,481 times
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