Gradients 1: Backprop Is the Chain Rule, and the Chain Rule Has Hypotheses

Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. relu, abs, clamp, hardtanh and a vector norm all return 0 at their kinks; maximum, minimum and max split the tie and return 0.5; and sqrt(x·x), which is abs(x), returns nan where abs returns 0....

September 10, 2026 · 15 min · Jongha Jeon

Gradients 2: A Confident Attention Head Passes Almost No Gradient

Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. The softmax Jacobian is diag(p) minus p pᵀ, its quadratic form is exactly a variance under p, and so its spectral norm is trapped between m(1 - m) and 2m(1 - m) where m is the largest probability - checked on 25,443 random distributions with no violations and the upper end attained to nine digits....

September 10, 2026 · 16 min · Jongha Jeon

Gradients 3: LayerNorm Deletes Exactly Two Directions of Your Gradient

Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. The LayerNorm Jacobian is the orthogonal projector off the plane spanned by the all-ones vector and the normalised input, divided by sigma - verified against autodiff to 2e-16, rank exactly d minus 2, and with a flat nonzero spectrum because it really is a projector....

September 11, 2026 · 16 min · Jongha Jeon

Gradients 4: You Cannot Differentiate Through a Sampled Token

Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. The gradient of the expectation is p times loss minus its mean, which is episode 2’s softmax Jacobian applied to the losses and sums to exactly zero. Over 65 tokens it is enumerable, so every estimator has an answer to be wrong against....

September 11, 2026 · 16 min · Jongha Jeon

Gradients 5: The Gradient in Embedding Space Does Not Point at a Token

Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. The embedding table’s median pairwise distance is 11.214 and sqrt(2) times its median norm is 11.210 - the distance between orthogonal vectors of that length, matched to four figures, with a median pairwise cosine of +0....

September 11, 2026 · 15 min · Jongha Jeon