Deep learning notes 09: Grokking - overfit into generalization

#papers

This post if from a series of quick notes written primarily for personal usage while reading random ML/SWE/CS papers. As such they might be incomprehensible and/or flat out wrong.

Grokking: Generalization beyond Overfitting on small algorithmic datasets

  • Neural network suddenly generalizes way beyond the point of overfitting with proper regularization
    • Train accuracy rises with training steps, eventually NN overfits on training data, training continues…
    • After orders of magnitude more steps, the network suddenly generalizes and test accuracy shoots up as well
  • Similar to the idea of double descent, just with training steps instead of number of parameters
  • In DD - when trained to convergence the relationship between test accuracy and number of parameters
    • With higher capacity models test accuracy first increases as the model is becoming capable
    • Then it starts going down when the network is big enough to remember dataset -> overfitting
    • Increasing the number of parameters further leads to increase of accuracy again, surpassing previous best
    • Interpretation: at some point there are enough parameters to nicely match all datapoints but smoothy (with proper regularization)
  • This paper dataset: variables + binary operation (e.g. polynomial operations) without any noise
    • Dataset is a table of all pairs of variables + the result of the operation
    • The network predicts the result of the operation for specific variables (portion blanked for trained data)
    • Dataset is very specific & without noise, on real world issues the phenomena is hard to induce / see
  • Multiple variables of the dataset
    • Size of the dataset
    • Complexity of the operation
    • Train dataset ratio
  • Training accuracy shoots to 100 % soon (10^2 steps), test accuracy to 100 % also but later (10^5)
    • The higher the train set ratio, the faster the snap on test accuracy happens
    • The easier the operation is (e.g. there are symmetries) the easier it happens
    • The bigger the dataset, the harder it is to induce the phenomena
  • Weight decay seems to be very important to make the phenomena appear faster
    • ? Prefers simple solutions vs remembering whole dataset
    • So many train steps that a good solution is eventually discovered & then preferred because ^^
    • Maybe weight decay is good-ish but not the best regularization
  • Visualization of the weights (t-SNE) shows structure that could be interpreted via the operation
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