arXiv Machine Learning By Chanju Park, Dario Bocchi, Francesco D'Amico, Biagio Lucini, Gert Aarts

Spectral phase transitions and trainability in neural network learning dynamics

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arXiv:2606. 28486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of low-dimensional structures in the spectra of neural network weight matrices is a common empirical feature of trained models, but the dynamical origin of this phenomenon during learning remains an open problem.

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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