A second difficulty with training RNNs arises from the need to backpropagate the error signal back through time. Recall from Section 9.2.2 that the hidden layer at time t contributes to the loss at the next time step since it takes part in that calculation. As a result, during the backward pass of training, the hidden layers are subject to repeated multiplications, as determined by the length of the sequence. A frequent result of this process is that the gradients are eventually driven to zero, a situation called the vanishing gradients problem.