Sim, você deveria entender o backpropagation!

Por Andrej Karpathy

Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction; it is a credit assignment scheme with non-trivial consequences. If you try to ignore how it works under the hood because “TensorFlow automagically makes my networks learn”, you will not be ready to wrestle with the dangers it presents, and you will be much less effective at building and debugging neural networks. The good news is that backpropagation is not that difficult to understand, if presented properly. I have relatively strong feelings on this topic because it seems to me that 95% of backpropagation materials out there present it all wrong, filling pages with mechanical math. Instead, I would recommend the CS231n lecture on backprop which emphasizes intuition (yay for shameless self-advertising). And if you can spare the time, as a bonus, work through the CS231n assignments, which get you to write backprop manually and help you solidify your understanding.