Mismatch between the dimensions of Jacobian matrixes when calculating derivatives during backprop? I am trying to understand how back propagation works for a linear layer using minibatches by following this post: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~justincj/teaching/eecs442/notes/linear-backprop.html.
Imagine the following:

*

*The weight matrix, $W$, has shape $D \times M$

*The input matrix has size $N \times D$, where $N$ is the size of the minibatch

We know the derivative of the loss, $L$, with respect to the output $Y$ of $X \cdot M$ will have dimensions: $N \times M$.
In other words, $\frac{\partial L}{\partial Y}$ has dimensions $N \times M$.
By the chain rule, we know:
$$
\frac{\partial L}{\partial X} = \frac{\partial Y}{\partial X} \frac{\partial L}{\partial Y}
$$
where $\frac{\partial Y}{\partial X}$ is a Jacobian matrix.
Here's my issue:

*

*We know the dimensions of $\frac{\partial Y}{\partial X}$ will be $N \times M$ by $N \times D$ since there are $N \times M$ outputs and $N \times D$ inputs.

*The matrix dimensions don't match up for multiplication. $(N \times M) \times (N \times D)$ times a $N \times M$ matrix is not a valid matrix multiplication.

What am I missing?

Using denominator layout notation, the order of the terms in the chain rule is correct. However, the multiplication is undefined because $\frac{\partial Y}{\partial X}$ is a 4D tensor. We don't have any well known rules to multiply a 4D tensor by a 2D tensor (i.e. matrix). The author instead chooses to compute the final derivative element by element and then come up with a formula.
So, I protest the authors about not mentioning

*

*the layout notation and the chain rule acc. to the layout chosen

*tensor dimensionality of the multiplicands and associated issues

