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Backpropagation: Single-Layer Network is a hard coding interview question covering deep learning, math, machine learning — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Implement forward and backward passes for a single-layer neural network (logistic regression):
Forward: z = X @ w + b, y_hat = sigmoid(z) Loss: L = -mean(y * log(y_hat) + (1-y) * log(1-y_hat))
Backward: dL/dz = y_hat - y (sigmoid + BCE simplification) dL/dw = X.T @ dz / n dL/db = mean(dz)
Update: w -= lr * dL/dw, b -= lr * dL/db
Return updated weights and loss after one step.
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