English
Related papers

Related papers: Generalization emerges from local optimization in …

200 papers

Despite the popularity and success of deep learning, there is limited understanding of when, how, and why neural networks generalize to unseen examples. Since learning can be seen as extracting information from data, we formally study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Hrayr Harutyunyan

Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance. Conventional wisdom attributes small generalization error either to properties of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Chiyuan Zhang , Samy Bengio , Moritz Hardt , Benjamin Recht , Oriol Vinyals

We propose that the grokking phenomenon, where the train loss of a neural network decreases much earlier than its test loss, can arise due to a neural network transitioning from lazy training dynamics to a rich, feature learning regime. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-12 Tanishq Kumar , Blake Bordelon , Samuel J. Gershman , Cengiz Pehlevan

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, or delayed generalization, is a phenomenon where generalization in a deep neural network (DNN) occurs long after achieving near zero training error. Previous studies have reported the occurrence of grokking in specific controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun , Randall Balestriero , Richard Baraniuk

Neural collapse, i.e., the emergence of highly symmetric, class-wise clustered representations, is frequently observed in deep networks and is often assumed to reflect or enable generalization. In parallel, flatness of the loss landscape…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ting Han , Linara Adilova , Henning Petzka , Jens Kleesiek , Michael Kamp

Training deep neural networks results in strong learned representations that show good generalization capabilities. In most cases, training involves iterative modification of all weights inside the network via back-propagation. In Extreme…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-06 Amir Rosenfeld , John K. Tsotsos

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

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 key to generalization is controlling the complexity of the network. However, there is no obvious control of complexity -- such as an explicit regularization term -- in the training of deep networks for classification. We will show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao , Brando Miranda , Lorenzo Rosasco , Fernanda De La Torre , Jack Hidary , Tomaso Poggio

Understanding the generalization properties of neural networks on simple input-output distributions is key to explaining their performance on real datasets. The classical teacher-student setting, where a network is trained on data generated…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-26 Rodrigo Pérez Ortiz , Gibbs Nwemadji , Jean Barbier , Federica Gerace , Alessandro Ingrosso , Clarissa Lauditi , Enrico M. Malatesta

Deep learning models have lately shown great performance in various fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, speech translation, and natural language processing. However, alongside their state-of-the-art performance, it is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Daniel Jakubovitz , Raja Giryes , Miguel R. D. Rodrigues

While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Tomaso Poggio , Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao

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

Grokking, the unusual phenomenon for algorithmic datasets where generalization happens long after overfitting the training data, has remained elusive. We aim to understand grokking by analyzing the loss landscapes of neural networks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Ziming Liu , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark

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

We study the grokking phenomenon through the lens of topology. Using persistent homology on point clouds derived from the embedding matrices of a range of models trained on modular arithmetic with varying primes, we identify a clear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yifan Tang , Qiquan Wang , Inés García-Redondo , Anthea Monod

Grokking refers to delayed generalization in which the increase in test accuracy of a neural network occurs appreciably after the improvement in training accuracy This paper introduces several practical metrics including variance under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Ahmed Salah , David Yevick

Overparameterized deep networks that generalize well have been key to the dramatic success of deep learning in recent years. The reasons for their remarkable ability to generalize are not well understood yet. When class labels in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Simran Ketha , Venkatakrishnan Ramaswamy

In some settings neural networks exhibit a phenomenon known as \textit{grokking}, where they achieve perfect or near-perfect accuracy on the validation set long after the same performance has been achieved on the training set. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Jack Miller , Charles O'Neill , Thang Bui