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Related papers: Deep Networks Always Grok and Here is Why

200 papers

Spectral bias, the tendency of neural networks to learn low frequencies first, can be both a blessing and a curse. While it enhances the generalization capabilities by suppressing high-frequency noise, it can be a limitation in scientific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Shuai Jiang , Alexey Voronin , Eric Cyr , Ben Southworth

Neural networks sometimes exhibit grokking, a phenomenon where perfect or near-perfect performance is achieved on a validation set well after the same performance has been obtained on the corresponding training set. In this workshop paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Jack Miller , Patrick Gleeson , Charles O'Neill , Thang Bui , Noam Levi

The vulnerability to slight input perturbations is a worrying yet intriguing property of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite many previous works studying the reason behind such adversarial behavior, the relationship between the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-07 Yujun Shi , Benben Liao , Guangyong Chen , Yun Liu , Ming-Ming Cheng , Jiashi Feng

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have set benchmarks on a wide array of supervised learning tasks. Trained DNNs, however, often lack robustness to minor adversarial perturbations to the input, which undermines their true practicality. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Farzan Farnia , Jesse M. Zhang , David Tse

Standard optimization theories struggle to explain grokking, where generalization occurs long after training convergence. While geometric studies attribute this to slow drift, they often overlook the interaction between the optimizer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Pratyush Acharya , Habish Dhakal

Robust generalization is a major challenge in deep learning, particularly when the number of trainable parameters is very large. In general, it is very difficult to know if the network has memorized a particular set of examples or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Darshil Doshi , Aritra Das , Tianyu He , Andrey Gromov

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

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are typically optimized using various forms of mini-batch gradient descent algorithm. A major motivation for mini-batch gradient descent is that with a suitably chosen batch size, available computing resources…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Oyebade K. Oyedotun , Konstantinos Papadopoulos , Djamila Aouada

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

The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Satrajit Chatterjee , Piotr Zielinski

Deep neural networks (NN) have achieved great success in many applications. However, why do deep neural networks obtain good generalization at an over-parameterization regime is still unclear. To better understand deep NN, we establish the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-02 Yueming Lyu , Ivor Tsang

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 generalization long after near-zero training loss -- has been studied mainly in single-task settings. We extend geometric analysis to multi-task modular arithmetic, training…

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

We discuss two solvable grokking (generalisation beyond overfitting) models in a rule learning scenario. We show that grokking is a phase transition and find exact analytic expressions for the critical exponents, grokking probability, and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-10-28 Bojan Žunkovič , Enej Ilievski

Background: It is still an open research area to theoretically understand why Deep Neural Networks (DNNs)---equipped with many more parameters than training data and trained by (stochastic) gradient-based methods---often achieve remarkably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Zhiqin John Xu

We investigate grokking in transformers through the lens of inductive bias: dispositions arising from architecture or optimization that let the network prefer one solution over another. We first show that architectural choices such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jaisidh Singh , Diganta Misra , Antonio Orvieto

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

Why does a Transformer that has memorized its training set wait thousands of steps before it generalizes? Existing accounts locate this delay in norm minimization, feature emergence, or the late discovery of sparse subnetworks. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Kai Hidajat , Solden Stoll , Joseph An

Grokking describes a delayed generalization phenomenon in which a neural network achieves perfect training accuracy long before validation accuracy improves, followed by an abrupt transition to strong generalization. Existing detection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Shreel Golwala

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