arXiv:2607. 23967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delayed generalization, or grokking, remains poorly understood despite extensive empirical study.
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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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 05863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking suggests that fitting the training data and learning a simple underlying rule may occur on different time scales.
arXiv:2606. 30388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Delayed generalization (\ie~grokking) refers to the phenomenon in which a neural network fits its training data early in training but only begins to generalize after a prolonged delay, often through an abrupt transition.
arXiv:2606. 13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data.
arXiv:2601. 19791v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study grokking, the onset of generalization long after overfitting, in a classical ridge regression setting.