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Neural networks often exhibit emergent behavior, where qualitatively new capabilities arise from scaling up the amount of parameters, training data, or training steps. One approach to understanding emergence is to find continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Neel Nanda , Lawrence Chan , Tom Lieberum , Jess Smith , Jacob Steinhardt

We present a simple neural network that can learn modular arithmetic tasks and exhibits a sudden jump in generalization known as ``grokking''. Concretely, we present (i) fully-connected two-layer networks that exhibit grokking on various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Andrey Gromov

In this work, we study the training and generalization performance of two-layer neural networks (NNs) after one gradient descent step under structured data modeled by Gaussian mixtures. While previous research has extensively analyzed this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

Graph neural networks (GNNs) integrate deep architectures and topological structure modeling in an effective way. However, the performance of existing GNNs would decrease significantly when they stack many layers, because of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Kaixiong Zhou , Xiao Huang , Daochen Zha , Rui Chen , Li Li , Soo-Hyun Choi , Xia Hu

The statistical properties of deep neural networks (DNNs) at initialization play an important role to comprehend their trainability and the intrinsic architectural biases they possess before data exposure Well established mean field (MF)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Alberto Bassi , Marco Baity-Jesi , Aurelien Lucchi , Carlo Albert , Emanuele Francazi

One puzzling artifact in machine learning dubbed grokking is where delayed generalization is achieved tenfolds of iterations after near perfect overfitting to the training data. Focusing on the long delay itself on behalf of machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Jaerin Lee , Bong Gyun Kang , Kihoon Kim , Kyoung Mu Lee

A key challenge for the machine learning community is to understand and accelerate the training dynamics of deep networks that lead to delayed generalisation and emergent robustness to input perturbations, also known as grokking. Prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Thomas Walker , Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun , Randall Balestriero , Richard Baraniuk

Grokking refers to a delayed generalization following overfitting when optimizing artificial neural networks with gradient-based methods. In this work, we demonstrate that grokking can be induced by regularization, either explicit or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo , Guillaume Dumas , Guillaume Rabusseau

Understanding how deep neural networks learn remains a fundamental challenge in modern machine learning. A growing body of evidence suggests that training dynamics undergo a distinct phase transition, yet our understanding of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhanpeng Zhou , Yongyi Yang , Mahito Sugiyama , Junchi Yan

Neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) have exhibited a number of surprising generalization behaviors. First, they can achieve a perfect fit to noisy training data and still generalize near-optimally, showing that overfitting can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Zhiwei Xu , Yutong Wang , Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi , Wei Hu

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) excel at many tasks, often rivaling or surpassing human performance. Yet their internal processes remain elusive, frequently described as "black boxes." While performance can be refined experimentally, achieving…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-02-03 Sebastiano Ariosto

There currently exist two extreme viewpoints for neural network feature learning -- (i) Neural networks simply implement a kernel method (a la NTK) and hence no features are learned (ii) Neural networks can represent (and hence learn)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Mahesh Lorik Yadav , Harish Guruprasad Ramaswamy , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan

This work bridges two important concepts: the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), which captures the evolution of deep neural networks (DNNs) during training, and the Neural Collapse (NC) phenomenon, which refers to the emergence of symmetry and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Mariia Seleznova , Dana Weitzner , Raja Giryes , Gitta Kutyniok , Hung-Hsu Chou

Feature learning is widely regarded as the key mechanism distinguishing neural networks from fixed-kernel methods, yet its impact on the induced function space remains poorly understood. In this work, we precisely characterize how the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 João Lobo , Bruno Loureiro , Long Tran-Than , Fanghui Liu

Deep neural networks are widely used prediction algorithms whose performance often improves as the number of weights increases, leading to over-parametrization. We consider a two-layered neural network whose first layer is frozen while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Roman Worschech , Bernd Rosenow

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the representation of a node by aggregating its neighbors, have become an effective computational tool in downstream applications. Over-smoothing is one of the key issues which limit the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Kaixiong Zhou , Xiao Huang , Yuening Li , Daochen Zha , Rui Chen , Xia Hu

Deep neural networks are renowned for their ability to generalise well across diverse tasks, even when heavily overparameterized. Existing works offer only partial explanations (for example, the NTK-based task-model alignment explanation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Chris Mingard , Lukas Seier , Niclas Göring , Andrei-Vlad Badelita , Charles London , Ard Louis

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools for compressing and distilling information. Their scale and complexity, often involving billions of inter-dependent parameters, render direct microscopic analysis difficult. Under such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-26 Inbar Seroussi , Gadi Naveh , Zohar Ringel

What features neural networks learn, and how, remains an open question. In this paper, we introduce Alternating Gradient Flows (AGF), an algorithmic framework that describes the dynamics of feature learning in two-layer networks trained…

The grokking phenomenon as reported by Power et al. ( arXiv:2201.02177 ) refers to a regime where a long period of overfitting is followed by a seemingly sudden transition to perfect generalization. In this paper, we attempt to reveal the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Vimal Thilak , Etai Littwin , Shuangfei Zhai , Omid Saremi , Roni Paiss , Joshua Susskind