arXiv AI By Truong Xuan Khanh

Emergence via Phase Transitions: Mechanism Landscapes and Universal Convergence Across Complex Systems

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arXiv:2606. 07563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Across machine learning, biology, and physics, independently evolving systems often converge toward strikingly similar high-level structures despite radically different microscopic details.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Quantifying the Memorization-to-Generalization Transition: Scaling Laws and Phase Structure in Grokking

The study investigates the delayed transition from memorization to generalization—known as grokking—in two‑hidden‑layer MLPs trained on modular arithmetic. By exploring 384 hyperparameter configurations, the authors derive a power‑law scaling relation for the onset time of generalization, showing that data complexity dominates over model capacity. A clear phase boundary at weight decay around 1.0 separates grokking from non‑grokking regimes, and weight norm trajectories indicate implicit regularization during the transition.

By Anish Kataria
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

A Spectral Theory of Grokking: Weight Decay induces Feature Learning

The paper presents a spectral theory explaining the phenomenon of grokking, where an initial fit to training data is followed by a delayed improvement in generalization. It shows that for homogeneous networks trained with squared loss and L₂ weight decay, residuals after memorization influence the neural tangent kernel (NTK) dynamics, leading to a transition from lazy to rich learning. The theory predicts that grokking timescales depend on the product of learning rate and weight decay, and that stronger decay can halt fitting, with empirical validation on modular addition tasks using MLPs and Transformers.

By Lenz Pracher, Pascal de Jong, Oskar Lieshaus, Alan Jeffares, Steffen Rulands
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Predictable GRPO: A Closed-Form Model of Training Dynamics

arXiv:2606. 30789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, yet its training dynamics are still described empirically: reward trajectories are fit with low-parameter functional forms whose constants carry no mechanistic meaning, and hyperparameter choices remain a matter of trial and error.

By Rajat Ghosh, Datta Nimmaturi, Aryan Singhal, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Henry Wong, Johnu George, Debojyoti Dutta