Related papers: Feature Repulsion and Spectral Lock-in: An Empiric…
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…
Training dynamics during grokking concentrate along a small number of dominant update directions -- the spectral edge -- which reliably distinguishes grokking from non-grokking regimes. We show that standard mechanistic interpretability…
We decompose the spectral edge -- the dominant direction of the Gram matrix of parameter updates -- into its gradient and weight-decay components during grokking in two sequence tasks (Dyck-1 and SCAN). We find a sharp two-phase lifecycle:…
In the reaction-diffusion process $A+B \to \varnothing$ on random scale-free (SF) networks with the degree exponent $\gamma$, the particle density decays with time in a power law with an exponent $\alpha$ when initial densities of each…
We develop the spectral edge analysis: phase transitions in neural network training -- grokking, capability gains, loss plateaus -- are controlled by the spectral gap of the rolling-window Gram matrix of parameter updates. In the extreme…
Identifying truly predictive covariates while strictly controlling false discoveries remains a fundamental challenge in nonlinear, highly correlated, and low signal-to-noise regimes, where deep learning based feature selection methods are…
We give a simple proof for the global convergence of gradient descent in training deep ReLU networks with the standard square loss, and show some of its improvements over the state-of-the-art. In particular, while prior works require all…
The electron reflection amplitude $R$ at stacking-fault (SF) induced fractional steps is determined for Ag(111) surface states using a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope. Unexpectedly, $R$ remains as high as $0.6 \sim 0.8$ as…
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…
Feature learning is thought to be one of the fundamental reasons for the success of deep neural networks. It is rigorously known that in two-layer fully-connected neural networks under certain conditions, one step of gradient descent on the…
Grokking, the phenomenon of delayed generalization, is often attributed to the depth and compositional structure of deep neural networks. We study grokking in one of the simplest possible settings: the learning of a linear model with…
In deep networks with small initialization, training exhibits long plateaus separated by sharp feature-acquisition transitions. Whereas shallow nonlinear networks and deep linear networks are well studied, extending these analyses to deep…
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…
The problem of motif detection can be formulated as the construction of a discriminant function to separate sequences of a specific pattern from background. In computational biology, motif detection is used to predict DNA binding sites of a…
Decelle et al.\cite{Decelle11} conjectured the existence of a sharp threshold for community detection in sparse random graphs drawn from the stochastic block model. Mossel et al.\cite{Mossel12} established the negative part of the…
Deep learning succeeds by doing hierarchical feature learning, yet tuning hyper-parameters (HP) such as initialization scales, learning rates etc., only give indirect control over this behavior. In this paper, we introduce a key notion to…
This paper explores robust recovery of a superposition of $R$ distinct complex exponential functions from a few random Gaussian projections. We assume that the signal of interest is of $2N-1$ dimensional and $R<<2N-1$. This framework covers…
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…
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…
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…