arXiv Machine Learning By Gunner Levi Howe

Structure-Specific Representational Priors Causally Control the Grokking Delay

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arXiv:2607. 04333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking -- generalization arriving long after training-set interpolation -- can be accelerated by structure-agnostic interventions: gradient filtering, weight-norm clamping, geometric penalties on hidden representations.

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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