Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-advanced-topics-in-statistical-machine-learning-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2025/2/c/i/solution

Let be the Jacobian matrix with row . Differentiating the squared-error loss function gives
The parameter gradient flow is consequently . The chain rule then gives
where, explicitly,
It is a Gram matrix and therefore a positive semidefinite matrix: . These derivatives are understood wherever the network is differentiable; for piecewise differentiable activations the same calculation applies along differentiable portions of the trajectory.

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