English
Related papers

Related papers: A rationale from frequency perspective for grokkin…

200 papers

A theory of neural networks (NNs) built upon collective variables would provide scientists with the tools to better understand the learning process at every stage. In this work, we introduce two such variables, the entropy and the trace of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Samuel Tovey , Sven Krippendorf , Konstantin Nikolaou , Christian Holm

This paper presents the first study of grokking in practical LLM pretraining. Specifically, we investigate when an LLM memorizes the training data, when its generalization on downstream tasks starts to improve, and what happens if there is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ziyue Li , Chenrui Fan , Tianyi Zhou

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

The training dynamics and generalization properties of neural networks (NN) can be precisely characterized in function space via the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Structural changes to the NTK during training reflect feature learning and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Haozhe Shan , Blake Bordelon

Recent works have partly attributed the generalization ability of over-parameterized neural networks to frequency bias -- networks trained with gradient descent on data drawn from a uniform distribution find a low frequency fit before high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Ronen Basri , Meirav Galun , Amnon Geifman , David Jacobs , Yoni Kasten , Shira Kritchman

We present a comprehensive analysis of how two-layer neural networks learn features to solve the modular addition task. Our work provides a full mechanistic interpretation of the learned model and a theoretical explanation of its training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Jianliang He , Leda Wang , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

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-context learning enables transformers to adapt to new tasks from a few examples at inference time, while grokking highlights that this generalization can emerge abruptly only after prolonged training. We study task generalization and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Abdessamed Qchohi , Simone Rossi

Grokking -- the sudden generalisation that appears long after a model has perfectly memorised its training data -- has been widely observed but lacks a quantitative theory explaining the length of the delay. We show that grokking is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Truong Xuan Khanh , Truong Quynh Hoa , Luu Duc Trung , Phan Thanh Duc

We propose that learning in deep neural networks proceeds in two phases: a rapid curve fitting phase followed by a slower compression or coarse graining phase. This view is supported by the shared temporal structure of three phenomena:…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-07-28 Robert de Mello Koch , Animik Ghosh

Grokking, the sudden generalization that occurs after prolonged overfitting, is a surprising phenomenon challenging our understanding of deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in understanding grokking, the reasons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Lucas Prieto , Melih Barsbey , Pedro A. M. Mediano , Tolga Birdal

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

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

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

We attribute grokking, the phenomenon where generalization is much delayed after memorization, to compression. To do so, we define linear mapping number (LMN) to measure network complexity, which is a generalized version of linear region…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Ziming Liu , Ziqian Zhong , Max Tegmark

Grokking, the sudden transition from memorization to generalization, is characterized by the emergence of low-dimensional representations, yet the mechanism underlying this organization remains elusive. We propose that intrinsic task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Hyeonbin Hwang , Yeachan Park

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

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 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

Along with fruitful applications of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to realistic problems, recently, some empirical studies of DNNs reported a universal phenomenon of Frequency Principle (F-Principle): a DNN tends to learn a target function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Tao Luo , Zheng Ma , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Yaoyu Zhang