1. Basically. It means that the network has a hard time pulling itself in any direction since the weights in the deeper layers are never really adjusted by very

1. Basically. It means that the network has a hard time pulling itself in any direction since the weights in the deeper layers are never really adjusted by very much. 2. It's been a while since I read the paper, but I believe that the justification has to do with the proof of convergence of Gibbs sampling. I haven't tried using continuous values, so I can't give an intuition for what happens in those cases.