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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

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

Grokking is a intriguing phenomenon in machine learning where a neural network, after many training iterations with negligible improvement in generalization, suddenly achieves high accuracy on unseen data. By working in the quantum-inspired…

In continual learning problems, it is often necessary to overwrite components of a neural network's learned representation in response to changes in the data stream; however, neural networks often exhibit \primacy bias, whereby early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Clare Lyle , Gharda Sokar , Razvan Pascanu , Andras Gyorgy

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

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

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

''Grokking'' is a phenomenon where a neural network first memorizes training data and generalizes poorly, but then suddenly transitions to near-perfect generalization after prolonged training. While intriguing, this delayed generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Zhiwei Xu , Zhiyu Ni , Yixin Wang , Wei Hu

Grokking, a phenomenon where machine learning models generalize long after overfitting, has been primarily observed and studied in algorithmic tasks. This paper explores grokking in real-world datasets using deep neural networks for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Satvik Golechha

We aim to understand grokking, a phenomenon where models generalize long after overfitting their training set. We present both a microscopic analysis anchored by an effective theory and a macroscopic analysis of phase diagrams describing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziming Liu , Ouail Kitouni , Niklas Nolte , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Mike Williams

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

Recently, an interesting phenomenon called grokking has gained much attention, where generalization occurs long after the models have initially overfitted the training data. We try to understand this seemingly strange phenomenon through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Zhiquan Tan , Weiran Huang

Grokking, a delayed generalization in neural networks after perfect training performance, has been observed in Transformers and MLPs, but the components driving it remain underexplored. We show that embeddings are central to grokking:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 H. V. AlquBoj , Hilal AlQuabeh , Velibor Bojkovic , Munachiso Nwadike , Kentaro Inui

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 demonstrate the existence of a complexity phase transition in neural networks by studying the grokking phenomenon, where networks suddenly transition from memorization to generalization long after overfitting their training data. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Branton DeMoss , Silvia Sapora , Jakob Foerster , Nick Hawes , Ingmar Posner

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

Despite their empirical success, how diffusion models generalize remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We demonstrate that diffusion models trained with flow-matching objectives exhibit grokking--delayed generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Joon Hyeok Kim , Yong-Hyun Park , Mattis Dalsætra Østby , Jiatao Gu

Classifying the training data correctly without over-fitting is one of the goals in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a generalization-memorization mechanism, including a generalization-memorization decision and a memory modeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Zhen Wang , Yuan-Hai Shao

Symmetries (transformations by group actions) are present in many datasets, and leveraging them holds considerable promise for improving predictions in machine learning. In this work, we aim to understand when and how deep networks -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Andrea Perin , Stephane Deny

A principled understanding of generalization in deep learning may require unifying disparate observations under a single conceptual framework. Previous work has studied \emph{grokking}, a training dynamic in which a sustained period of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Xander Davies , Lauro Langosco , David Krueger