Apologies if this isn't an appropriate place to post this.

Inspired by a paper I found a while back (https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/215545/local_215545.pdf), I tried my hand at implementing a program (in C#) to create ASCII art from an image. It works pretty well, but like they observed in the paper, it's pretty slow to compare every tile to 90-some glyphs. In the paper, they make a decision tree to replicate this process at a faster speed.

Recently, I revisited this. I thought I'd try making a neural net, since I found the idea interesting. I've watched some videos on neural nets, and refreshed myself on my linear algebra, and I think I've gotten pretty close. That said, I feel like there's something I'm missing (especially given the fact that the loss isn't really decreasing). I think my problem is specifically during backpropagation.

Here is a link to the TrainAsync method in GitHub: https://github.com/bendstein/ImageToASCII/blob/1c2e2260f5d4cfb45443fac8737566141f5eff6e/LibI2A/Converter/NNConverter.cs#L164C59-L164C69. The forward and backward propagation methods are below it.

If anyone can give me any feedback or advice on what I might be missing, I'd really appreciate it.