English
Related papers

Related papers: The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When …

200 papers

Deep learning models generalize well to in-distribution data but struggle to generalize compositionally, i.e., to combine a set of learned primitives to solve more complex tasks. In sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning, transformers are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Luana Ruiz , Joshua Ainslie , Santiago Ontañón

Imitation learning holds the promise of equipping robots with versatile skills by learning from expert demonstrations. However, policies trained on finite datasets often struggle to generalize beyond the training distribution. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Yixiao Wang

We investigate the phenomenon of grokking -- delayed generalization accompanied by non-monotonic test loss behavior -- in a simple binary logistic classification task, for which "memorizing" and "generalizing" solutions can be strictly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Alon Beck , Noam Levi , Yohai Bar-Sinai

Question answering models struggle to generalize to novel compositions of training patterns, such to longer sequences or more complex test structures. Current end-to-end models learn a flat input embedding which can lose input syntax…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Yu Gai , Paras Jain , Wendi Zhang , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dawn Song , Ion Stoica

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

While the phenomenon of grokking, i.e., delayed generalization, has been studied extensively, it remains an open problem whether there is a mathematical framework that characterizes what kind of features will emerge, how and in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Yuandong Tian

Graph Transformers, which incorporate self-attention and positional encoding, have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various graph learning tasks. Despite their impressive performance, the complex non-convex interactions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Tengfei Ma , Sijia Liu , Zaixi Zhang , Pin-Yu Chen

Transformers often struggle with length generalization, meaning they fail to generalize to sequences longer than those encountered during training. While arithmetic tasks are commonly used to study length generalization, certain tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun

The state of the art on many NLP tasks is currently achieved by large pre-trained language models, which require a considerable amount of computation. We explore a setting where many different predictions are made on a single piece of text.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Jingfei Du , Myle Ott , Haoran Li , Xing Zhou , Veselin Stoyanov

This paper investigates the failure cases and out-of-distribution behavior of transformers trained on matrix inversion and eigenvalue decomposition. I show that incorrect model predictions still retain deep mathematical properties of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 François Charton

Modular exponentiation is crucial to number theory and cryptography, yet remains largely unexplored from a mechanistic interpretability standpoint. We train a 4-layer encoder-decoder Transformer model to perform this operation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 David Demitri Africa , Sara M. Kapoor , Theo Simon Sorg , Challenger Mishra

Grokking describes a delayed generalization phenomenon in which a neural network achieves perfect training accuracy long before validation accuracy improves, followed by an abrupt transition to strong generalization. Existing detection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Shreel Golwala

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

Transformers trained on modular arithmetic exhibit sharp transitions between memorization, generalization, and collapse. We show that weight decay acts as a scalar empirical control parameter for these regimes, and introduce two cheap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Lucky Verma

Recent research has shown that generative models with highly disentangled representations fail to generalise to unseen combination of generative factor values. These findings contradict earlier research which showed improved performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Milton L. Montero , Jeffrey S. Bowers , Rui Ponte Costa , Casimir J. H. Ludwig , Gaurav Malhotra

Robust generalization is a major challenge in deep learning, particularly when the number of trainable parameters is very large. In general, it is very difficult to know if the network has memorized a particular set of examples or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Darshil Doshi , Aritra Das , Tianyu He , Andrey Gromov

What makes generalization hard for imitation learning in visual robotic manipulation? This question is difficult to approach at face value, but the environment from the perspective of a robot can often be decomposed into enumerable factors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Annie Xie , Lisa Lee , Ted Xiao , Chelsea Finn

Grokking-the phenomenon where validation accuracy of neural networks on modular addition of two integers rises long after training data has been memorized-has been characterized in previous works as producing sinusoidal input weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Anand Swaroop

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

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