Do vanishing gradients always fully disappear?

Vanishing gradients don’t always fully disappear, they just get really small, like whispering through a long tunnel.

Imagine you're passing a message from one friend to another in a line. Each friend whispers the message to the next person. If the message gets softer and softer as it goes along, eventually it might be so quiet that no one can hear it anymore. That’s vanishing gradients, the message (or the gradient) becomes too small to matter.

Now imagine you have a super loud friend at the beginning of the line. Their voice carries all the way through, and even the last person in the line can still hear clearly. That’s like having strong gradients, they don’t disappear completely.

But if the first friend only whispers just a little bit, then by the time it gets to the end of the tunnel, it might be so quiet that no one hears anything at all. That's when gradients vanish fully, they're too tiny to help the learning process anymore.

So vanishing gradients are like whispering messages in a long tunnel, sometimes you can still hear them, and sometimes they fade away completely. Vanishing gradients don’t always fully disappear, they just get really small, like whispering through a long tunnel.

Imagine you're passing a message from one friend to another in a line. Each friend whispers the message to the next person. If the message gets softer and softer as it goes along, eventually it might be so quiet that no one can hear it anymore. That’s vanishing gradients, the message (or the gradient) becomes too small to matter.