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We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context--a fundamental skill for various LLM applications, including in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Ang Lv , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang , Rui Yan

This paper focuses on predicting the occurrence of grokking in neural networks, a phenomenon in which perfect generalization emerges long after signs of overfitting or memorization are observed. It has been reported that grokking can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Pascal Jr. Tikeng Notsawo , Hattie Zhou , Mohammad Pezeshki , Irina Rish , Guillaume Dumas

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

We design and analyze a new paradigm for building supervised learning networks, driven only by local optimization rules without relying on a global error function. Traditional neural networks with a fixed topology are made up of identical…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2024-10-04 S. Barland , L. Gil

Grokking -- the delayed transition from memorization to generalization in small algorithmic tasks -- remains poorly understood. We present a geometric analysis of optimization dynamics in transformers trained on modular arithmetic. PCA of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yongzhong Xu

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

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

Critical-data-size accounts of grokking suggest a natural post-threshold intuition: once training data is sufficient to identify the underlying rule, additional data should accelerate validation convergence. We show that this intuition can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Shin So , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

\emph{Memorization} in neural networks lacks a precise operational definition and is often inferred from the grokking regime, where training accuracy saturates while test accuracy remains very low. We identify a previously unreported third…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hari K Prakash , Charles H Martin

This paper proves that robustness implies generalization via data-dependent generalization bounds. As a result, robustness and generalization are shown to be connected closely in a data-dependent manner. Our bounds improve previous bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Kenji Kawaguchi , Zhun Deng , Kyle Luh , Jiaoyang Huang

We aim to understand grokking, a phenomenon where models generalize long after overfitting their training set. We present both a microscopic analysis anchored by an effective theory and a macroscopic analysis of phase diagrams describing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziming Liu , Ouail Kitouni , Niklas Nolte , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Mike Williams

One of the principal scientific challenges in deep learning is explaining generalization, i.e., why the particular way the community now trains networks to achieve small training error also leads to small error on held-out data from the…

Generalization is one of the fundamental issues in machine learning. However, traditional techniques like uniform convergence may be unable to explain generalization under overparameterization. As alternative approaches, techniques based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Jiaye Teng , Jianhao Ma , Yang Yuan

We analyze the effect of quantizing weights and activations of neural networks on their loss and derive a simple regularization scheme that improves robustness against post-training quantization. By training quantization-ready networks, our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Milad Alizadeh , Arash Behboodi , Mart van Baalen , Christos Louizos , Tijmen Blankevoort , Max Welling

A key property of deep neural networks (DNNs) is their ability to learn new features during training. This intriguing aspect of deep learning stands out most clearly in recently reported Grokking phenomena. While mainly reflected as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-07 Noa Rubin , Inbar Seroussi , Zohar Ringel

Generalization is the ability of a model to predict on unseen domains and is a fundamental task in machine learning. Several generalization bounds, both theoretical and empirical have been proposed but they do not provide tight bounds .In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Sumukh Aithal K , Dhruva Kashyap , Natarajan Subramanyam

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

Grokking, the abrupt transition from memorization to generalisation after extended training, suggests the presence of competing solution basins with distinct statistical properties. We study this phenomenon through the lens of Singular…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Ben Cullen , Sergio Estan-Ruiz , Riya Danait , Jiayi Li

Grokking is the phenomenon whereby, unlike the training performance, which peaks early in the training process, the test/generalization performance of a model stagnates over arbitrarily many epochs and then suddenly jumps to usually close…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ali Saheb Pasand , Elvis Dohmatob

Grokking-delayed generalization that emerges well after a model has fit the training data-has been linked to robustness and representation quality. We ask whether this training regime also helps with machine unlearning, i.e., removing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Yuanbang Liang , Yang Li