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Related papers: The Implicit Bias of Benign Overfitting

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Modern deep learning models are usually highly over-parameterized so that they can overfit the training data. Surprisingly, such overfitting neural networks can usually still achieve high prediction accuracy. To study this "benign…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Xuran Meng , Difan Zou , Yuan Cao

Overfitting is a phenomenon that occurs when a machine learning model is trained for too long and focused too much on the exact fitness of the training samples to the provided training labels and cannot keep track of the predictive rules…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Nuri Korhan , Samet Bayram

In a regression context, when the relevant subset of explanatory variables is uncertain, it is common to use a data-driven model selection procedure. Classical linear model theory, applied naively to the selected sub-model, may not be valid…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-08 Liang Hong , Todd A. Kuffner , Ryan Martin

Benign overfitting refers to how over-parameterized neural networks can fit training data perfectly and generalize well to unseen data. While this has been widely investigated theoretically, existing works are limited to two-layer networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Shuning Shang , Xuran Meng , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

Deep, overparameterized regression models are notorious for their tendency to overfit. This problem is exacerbated in heteroskedastic models, which predict both mean and residual noise for each data point. At one extreme, these models fit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-15 Eliot Wong-Toi , Alex Boyd , Vincent Fortuin , Stephan Mandt

Recent theoretical studies (Kou et al., 2023; Cao et al., 2022) have revealed a sharp phase transition from benign to harmful overfitting when the noise-to-feature ratio exceeds a threshold-a situation common in long-tailed data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Ruichen Xu , Kexin Chen

We investigate two causes for adversarial vulnerability in deep neural networks: bad data and (poorly) trained models. When trained with SGD, deep neural networks essentially achieve zero training error, even in the presence of label noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K Dokania , Varun Kanade , Philip H. S. Torr

We consider the overfitting behavior of minimum norm interpolating solutions of Gaussian kernel ridge regression (i.e. kernel ridgeless regression), when the bandwidth or input dimension varies with the sample size. For fixed dimensions, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-09 Marko Medvedev , Gal Vardi , Nathan Srebro

We study theoretical predictive performance of ridge and ridge-less least-squares regression when covariate vectors arise from evaluating $p$ random, means-square continuous functions over a latent metric space at $n$ random and unobserved…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-20 Andrew Jones , Nick Whiteley

There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

Overparametrized neural networks tend to perfectly fit noisy training data yet generalize well on test data. Inspired by this empirical observation, recent work has sought to understand this phenomenon of benign overfitting or harmless…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Andrew D. McRae , Santhosh Karnik , Mark A. Davenport , Vidya Muthukumar

Benign overfitting is well-characterized in $\ell_2$ geometries, but its behavior under the $\ell_1$ implicit bias of greedy ensembles remains challenging. The analytical barrier stems from the non-linear coupling of coordinate selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ye Su , Jian Li , Yong Liu

Excessive reuse of holdout data can lead to overfitting. However, there is little concrete evidence of significant overfitting due to holdout reuse in popular multiclass benchmarks today. Known results show that, in the worst-case,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-27 Vitaly Feldman , Roy Frostig , Moritz Hardt

Learned classifiers should often possess certain invariance properties meant to encourage fairness, robustness, or out-of-distribution generalization. However, multiple recent works empirically demonstrate that common invariance-inducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Yoav Wald , Gal Yona , Uri Shalit , Yair Carmon

Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for many successful large-scale models, demonstrating the ability to overfit the training data while maintaining strong generalization on unseen data, a phenomenon known as benign…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yingying Zhang , Zhenyu Wu , Jian Li , Yong Liu

Overfitting in deep learning has been the focus of a number of recent works, yet its exact impact on the behavior of neural networks is not well understood. This study analyzes overfitting by examining how the distribution of logits alters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-02 Zeju Li , Konstantinos Kamnitsas , Ben Glocker

Classical wisdom suggests that estimators should avoid fitting noise to achieve good generalization. In contrast, modern overparameterized models can yield small test error despite interpolating noise -- a phenomenon often called "benign…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-02 Michael Aerni , Marco Milanta , Konstantin Donhauser , Fanny Yang

Understanding how overparameterized neural networks generalize despite perfect interpolation of noisy training data is a fundamental question. Mallinar et. al. 2022 noted that neural networks seem to often exhibit ``tempered overfitting'',…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Nirmit Joshi , Gal Vardi , Nathan Srebro

This paper studies linear overparameterized models in economic forecasting and highlights that including noise variables (regressors with no predictive power) regularizes the estimator. We consider a setting where both the outcome variable…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-16 Yuan Liao , Xinjie Ma , Andreas Neuhierl , Zhentao Shi

Meta-learning has arisen as a successful method for improving training performance by training over many similar tasks, especially with deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the theoretical understanding of when and why overparameterized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Peizhong Ju , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff