# What would be the implications of mistakenly adding bias after the activation function?

I was looking at the source code for a personal project neural network implementation, and the bias for each node was mistakenly applied after the activation function. The output of each node was therefore $$\sigma\big(\sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i\big)+b$$ instead of $$\sigma\big(\sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i + b\big)$$. Assuming standard back-propagation algorithms are used for training, what (if any) impact would this have?

Let $$L(\mathbf{w}, b) = \sigma \left(\sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i \right)+b$$, then the partial derivative of $$L$$ with respect to $$b$$, in Leibniz's notation, is $$\frac{\partial L}{\partial b} = 1$$. Let $$L(\mathbf{w}, b) = \sigma \left(\sum_{i=1}^n w_i x_i + b \right)$$, then the partial derivative of $$L$$ with respect to $$b$$ is $$\frac{\partial L}{\partial b} = \frac{\partial L}{\partial \sigma} \frac{\partial \sigma}{\partial b}$$.
So, in general, the partial derivatives with respect to $$b$$ would be different in these two cases, thus, in the gradient descent step, $$b$$ would be updated differently in both cases. In practice, it may or not affect the performance of the model, depending on the importance of the bias with respect to the given problem. Read this answer to understand the role of the bias.