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Related papers: Is Grokking a Computational Glass Relaxation?

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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

Neural networks often exhibit emergent behavior, where qualitatively new capabilities arise from scaling up the amount of parameters, training data, or training steps. One approach to understanding emergence is to find continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Neel Nanda , Lawrence Chan , Tom Lieberum , Jess Smith , Jacob Steinhardt

We study the well-known grokking phenomena in neural networks (NNs) using a 3-layer MLP trained on 1 k-sample subset of MNIST, with and without weight decay, and discover a novel third phase -- \emph{anti-grokking} -- that occurs very late…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Hari K. Prakash , Charles H. Martin

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

We study grokking, the onset of generalization long after overfitting, in a classical ridge regression setting. We prove end-to-end grokking results for learning over-parameterized linear regression models using gradient descent with weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Mingyue Xu , Gal Vardi , Itay Safran

Deep learning sometimes appears to work in unexpected ways. In pursuit of a deeper understanding of its surprising behaviors, we investigate the utility of a simple yet accurate model of a trained neural network consisting of a sequence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Alan Jeffares , Alicia Curth , Mihaela van der Schaar

\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

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

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

In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of grokking, where models exhibit delayed generalization following overfitting on training data. We focus on data-scarce regimes where the number of training samples falls below the critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Vaibhav Singh , Eugene Belilovsky , Rahaf Aljundi

Recent works have shown that on sufficiently over-parametrized neural nets, gradient descent with relatively large initialization optimizes a prediction function in the RKHS of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). This analysis leads to global…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-28 Colin Wei , Jason D. Lee , Qiang Liu , Tengyu Ma

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

Grokking typically achieves similar loss to ordinary, "steady", learning. We ask whether these different learning paths - grokking versus ordinary training - lead to fundamental differences in the learned models. To do so we compare the…

We present a theoretical explanation of the ``grokking'' phenomenon, where a model generalizes long after overfitting,for the originally-studied problem of modular addition. First, we show that early in gradient descent, when the ``kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Mohamad Amin Mohamadi , Zhiyuan Li , Lei Wu , Danica J. Sutherland

Existing accounts of grokking explain the phenomena in terms of mechanistic frameworks such as circuit efficiency or lazy-to-rich transitions. However, despite a known dependence between grokking and model size, how model capacity shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yiding Song , Hanming Ye

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

Neural networks readily learn a subset of the modular arithmetic tasks, while failing to generalize on the rest. This limitation remains unmoved by the choice of architecture and training strategies. On the other hand, an analytical…

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

This paper demonstrates that grokking behavior in modular arithmetic with a modulus P in a neural network can be controlled by modifying the profile of the activation function as well as the depth and width of the model. Plotting the even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Ahmed Salah , David Yevick

We present a non-asymptotic theory of generalization in deep learning where the empirical neural tangent kernel partitions the output space. In directions corresponding to signal, error dissipates rapidly; in the vast orthogonal dimensions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Elon Litman , Gabe Guo

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