Asked about Vanishing and exploding gradients, measured

What causes vanishing gradients and how are they addressed?

An answer that works

Backpropagation multiplies local derivatives layer by layer; if they are consistently below one, as with saturating activations or poorly scaled weights, gradients shrink exponentially towards early layers. Fixes are ReLU-family activations, careful initialisation, normalisation layers and residual connections.

Reading an answer is not being able to give one. The section that teaches this is Vanishing and exploding gradients, measured, 3 hours of Backpropagation.

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