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AI & Engineering Academics›🌿 AI Sprouts›Lessons›Backpropagation - The Calculus Behind Learning
⛓️
AI Sprouts • Intermediate⏱️ 16 min read

Backpropagation - The Calculus Behind Learning

Public lesson preview

Understand how neural networks learn by propagating errors backwards through layers, using the chain rule to update every weight.

Programme
AI Sprouts
Level
Intermediate
Reading time
16 min read

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will understand:

  • ✓A Quick Forward Pass Recap
  • ✓The Key Insight - Blame Assignment
  • ✓The Chain Rule - One Idea to Rule Them All
  • ✓Computation Graphs - Visualising the Maths
  • ✓Gradient Flow Through Layers

Lesson outline

  1. A Quick Forward Pass Recap
  2. The Key Insight - Blame Assignment
  3. The Chain Rule - One Idea to Rule Them All
  4. Computation Graphs - Visualising the Maths
  5. A Tiny Worked Example
  6. Gradient Flow Through Layers
  7. Vanishing Gradients
  8. Exploding Gradients
  9. How Weights Actually Update
  10. Why Backprop Matters
  11. Key Takeaways
  12. 📚 Further Reading

Introductory preview

In the previous lessons you saw that neural networks have weights, and training adjusts those weights. But how does the network know which weights to change, and by how much? The answer is backpropagation - the single most important algorithm in modern deep learning. Andrej Karpathy calls it "the most important thing to understand about neural networks." Let us see why.

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