Keras: How is the loss evaluated during optimization for a network with multiple output layers?

Question

I am using functional API in Keras to build a neural network model with multiple output layers. I was wondering how the loss is evaluated when updating the weights during optimization (When doing back-prop). Assuming that the same loss function is used, is then the average loss of all outputs used to minimize the cost function or is each output evaluated separately to update the weights?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There is always only one loss that is used to backpropagate the errors, when a model has multiple outputs, then each output is associated one loss, and then a "global" loss is constructed by weighting the loss for each output. You can set the weight for each loss when you compile the model.