The L1 Loss Gradient, Explained From Scratch

📰 Towards AI

Author(s): Utkarsh Mittal Originally published on Towards AI. A complete, step-by-step walkthrough of how gradient descent works with absolute-value loss — with diagrams you can actually follow. If you’ve ever read a deep learning tutorial and hit a derivative that seems to appear from nowhere, this article is for you. We’re going to break down one of the simplest — yet most instructive — gradient calculations in machine learning: the gradient of L1 (absolute-value) loss with respect to a single

Published 10 Apr 2026
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