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Our understanding of the generalization capabilities of neural networks (NNs) is still incomplete. Prevailing explanations are based on implicit biases of gradient descent (GD) but they cannot account for the capabilities of models from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Damien Teney , Armand Nicolicioiu , Valentin Hartmann , Ehsan Abbasnejad

Background. A main theoretical puzzle is why over-parameterized Neural Networks (NNs) generalize well when trained to zero loss (i.e., so they interpolate the data). Usually, the NN is trained with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) or one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Gon Buzaglo , Itamar Harel , Mor Shpigel Nacson , Alon Brutzkus , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

Neural architectures tend to fit their data with relatively simple functions. This "simplicity bias" is widely regarded as key to their success. This paper explores the limits of this principle. Building on recent findings that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Damien Teney , Liangze Jiang , Florin Gogianu , Ehsan Abbasnejad

Existing research often posits spurious features as easier to learn than core features in neural network optimization, but the impact of their relative simplicity remains under-explored. Moreover, studies mainly focus on end performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 GuanWen Qiu , Da Kuang , Surbhi Goel

The remarkable generalization ability of neural networks is usually attributed to the implicit bias of SGD, which often yields models with lower complexity using simpler (e.g. linear) and low-rank features. Recent works have provided…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Khashayar Gatmiry , Zhiyuan Li , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka

Deep neural networks trained on a wide range of datasets demonstrate impressive transferability. Deep features appear general in that they are applicable to many datasets and tasks. Such property is in prevalent use in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Hong Liu , Mingsheng Long , Jianmin Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Classical learning theory suggests that the optimal generalization performance of a machine learning model should occur at an intermediate model complexity, with simpler models exhibiting high bias and more complex models exhibiting high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-09 Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

An intriguing phenomenon observed during training neural networks is the spectral bias, which states that neural networks are biased towards learning less complex functions. The priority of learning functions with low complexity might be at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Yuan Cao , Zhiying Fang , Yue Wu , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Deep neural networks are often seen as different from other model classes by defying conventional notions of generalization. Popular examples of anomalous generalization behaviour include benign overfitting, double descent, and the success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Andrew Gordon Wilson

Algorithmic approaches endow deep learning systems with implicit bias that helps them generalize even in over-parametrized settings. In this paper, we focus on understanding such a bias induced in learning through dropout, a popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-27 Poorya Mianjy , Raman Arora , Rene Vidal

We perform an empirical study of the behaviour of deep networks when fully linearizing some of its feature channels through a sparsity prior on the overall number of nonlinear units in the network. In experiments on image classification and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Christian H. X. Ali Mehmeti-Göpel , Jan Disselhoff

Neural networks often operate in the overparameterized regime, in which there are far more parameters than training samples, allowing the training data to be fit perfectly. That is, training the network effectively learns an interpolating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Suzanna Parkinson , Greg Ongie , Rebecca Willett

Modern foundation models exhibit remarkable out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, solving tasks far beyond the support of their training data. However, the theoretical principles underpinning this phenomenon remain elusive. This paper…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-29 Jiawei Ge , Amanda Wang , Shange Tang , Chi Jin

Recently, neural network architectures have been developed to accommodate when the data has the structure of a graph or, more generally, a hypergraph. While useful, graph structures can be potentially limiting. Hypergraph structures in…

Algebraic Topology · Mathematics 2020-12-14 Eric Bunch , Qian You , Glenn Fung , Vikas Singh

A major challenge in understanding the generalization of deep learning is to explain why (stochastic) gradient descent can exploit the network architecture to find solutions that have good generalization performance when using high capacity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Yifan Wu , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

Recent studies suggest that deep learning models inductive bias towards favoring simpler features may be one of the sources of shortcut learning. Yet, there has been limited focus on understanding the complexity of the myriad features that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Thomas Fel , Louis Bethune , Andrew Kyle Lampinen , Thomas Serre , Katherine Hermann

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Pietro Morerio , Ruggero Ragonesi , Vittorio Murino

One hypothesis for the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) is that they are highly expressive, which enables them to be applied to many problems, and they have a strong inductive bias towards solutions that are simple, known as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-04 Jessica Pointing

This paper proposes a straightforward and cost-effective approach to assess whether a deep neural network (DNN) relies on the primary concepts of training samples or simply learns discriminative, yet simple and irrelevant features that can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Mohammad Mahdi Mehmanchi , Mahbod Nouri , Mohammad Sabokrou

The empirical success of deep learning is often attributed to deep networks' ability to exploit hierarchical structure in data, constructing increasingly complex features across layers. Yet despite substantial progress in deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yunwei Ren , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Jason D. Lee