# The gradient of neural networks w.r.t one-hot encoded inputs

One-hot encoding as raw inputs for deep learning models can find its applications in many domains, such as bioinformatics, NLP, chemistry and so on. Suppose we trained a neural network $$f(x)$$ with $$x$$ one-hot encoded. Now I want to evaluate the importance of each character based on the gradient $$\partial f(x)/\partial x$$ (e.g. saliency, inputxgrad, integrated gradients ...). When training $$f(x)$$, the gradient of loss function is well-defined on the network weights. Then primary question here is if $$f(x)$$ is differentiable w.r.t. $$x$$?

Strictly speaking, $$f(x)$$ is defined on binary values. Then for instance, in the following figure, a small deviation in the position of "T" would make no sense. So $$\partial f(x)/\partial x$$ is not well-defined, is that correct?

In the case of NLP, one-hot encoded words are first represented by embedding vectors of continuous values, e.g. word2vec. Then for a trained language model, for evaluating word contribution, we don't need to trace back to one-hot encoding but only to embedding vectors.

I haven't found similar discussions after a quick search. Is this trivial? Thanks a lot for your inputs!

• thanks a lot for the references. Technically there is no issue to actually compute $\partial y/\partial x$ in either PyTorch or Tensoflow framework. My concern is that what the calculated gradient values corresponding to 0's in the one hot encoding actually mean. In the first link, an euclidean norm is calculated for the gradient for each one hot encoded word. How to justify the effectiveness of this method? I would like to have conceptual justifications. Oct 31 '20 at 20:42