Additionally, we can represent the biases and activations as layer-wise column vectors \( \vec{b}_l \) and \( \vec{y}_l \), so that the \( i \)-th element of each vector is the bias \( b_i^l \) and activation \( y_i^l \) of node \( i \) in layer \( l \) respectively.
We have that \( \mathrm{W}_l \) is a \( N_{l-1} \times N_l \) matrix, while \( \vec{b}_l \) and \( \vec{y}_l \) are \( N_l \times 1 \) column vectors. With this notation, the sum in becomes a matrix-vector multiplication, and we can write the equation for the activations of hidden layer 2 in $$ \begin{equation} \vec{y}_2 = f_2(\mathrm{W}_2 \vec{y}_{1} + \vec{b}_{2}) = f_2\left(\left[\begin{array}{ccc} w^2_{11} &w^2_{12} &w^2_{13} \\ w^2_{21} &w^2_{22} &w^2_{23} \\ w^2_{31} &w^2_{32} &w^2_{33} \\ \end{array} \right] \cdot \left[\begin{array}{c} y^1_1 \\ y^1_2 \\ y^1_3 \\ \end{array}\right] + \left[\begin{array}{c} b^2_1 \\ b^2_2 \\ b^2_3 \\ \end{array}\right]\right) \tag{13} \end{equation} $$ and we see that the activation of node \( i \) in layer 2 is $$ \begin{equation} y^2_i = f_2\Bigr(w^2_{i1}y^1_1 + w^2_{i2}y^1_2 + w^2_{i3}y^1_3 + b^2_i\Bigr) = f_2\left(\sum_{j=1}^3 w^2_{ij} y_j^1 + b^2_i\right) \tag{14} \end{equation} $$ which is in accordance with. Note that This is not just a convenient and compact notation, but also a useful and intuitive way to think about MLPs: The output is calculated by a series of matrix-vector multiplications and vector additions that are used as input to the activation functions. For each operation \( \mathrm{W}_l \vec{y}_{l-1} \) we move forward one layer.