@Sam_Lerman I can assure you my knowledge of Autograd is atrocious 
. However, just in case, did you take a look at this post 
Exact meaning of grad_input and grad_output?
On a side note, the two posts I was referring to were on either side of my first reply. Your original post and your subsequent post to my reply. In my minimal understanding of backpropagation and automatic differentiation, I would not necessarily think the docstring you were referring to is either wrong or misleading. It’s best left to the individual to interpret it in a way that could aid them in generalizing their intuition (which could be wrong too 
).