Bridging Lottery Ticket and Grokking: Understanding Grokking from Inner Structure of Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Minegishi, Gouki, Iwasawa, Yusuke, Matsuo, Yutaka
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Minegishi, Gouki
Iwasawa, Yusuke
Matsuo, Yutaka
author_facet Minegishi, Gouki
Iwasawa, Yusuke
Matsuo, Yutaka
contents Grokking is an intriguing phenomenon of delayed generalization, where neural networks initially memorize training data with perfect accuracy but exhibit poor generalization, subsequently transitioning to a generalizing solution with continued training. While factors such as weight norms and sparsity have been proposed to explain this delayed generalization, the influence of network structure remains underexplored. In this work, we link the grokking phenomenon to the lottery ticket hypothesis to investigate the impact of internal network structures. We demonstrate that utilizing lottery tickets obtained during the generalizing phase (termed grokked tickets) significantly reduces delayed generalization across various tasks, including multiple modular arithmetic operations, polynomial regression, sparse parity, and MNIST classification. Through controlled experiments, we show that the mitigation of delayed generalization is not due solely to reduced weight norms or increased sparsity, but rather to the discovery of good subnetworks. Furthermore, we find that grokked tickets exhibit periodic weight patterns, beneficial graph properties such as increased average path lengths and reduced clustering coefficients, and undergo rapid structural changes that coincide with improvements in generalization. Additionally, pruning techniques like the edge-popup algorithm can identify these effective structures without modifying the weights, thereby transforming memorizing networks into generalizing ones. These results underscore the novel insight that structural exploration plays a pivotal role in understanding grokking. The implementation code can be accessed via this link: https://github.com/gouki510/Grokking-Tickets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_19470
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Lottery Ticket and Grokking: Understanding Grokking from Inner Structure of Networks
Minegishi, Gouki
Iwasawa, Yusuke
Matsuo, Yutaka
Machine Learning
Grokking is an intriguing phenomenon of delayed generalization, where neural networks initially memorize training data with perfect accuracy but exhibit poor generalization, subsequently transitioning to a generalizing solution with continued training. While factors such as weight norms and sparsity have been proposed to explain this delayed generalization, the influence of network structure remains underexplored. In this work, we link the grokking phenomenon to the lottery ticket hypothesis to investigate the impact of internal network structures. We demonstrate that utilizing lottery tickets obtained during the generalizing phase (termed grokked tickets) significantly reduces delayed generalization across various tasks, including multiple modular arithmetic operations, polynomial regression, sparse parity, and MNIST classification. Through controlled experiments, we show that the mitigation of delayed generalization is not due solely to reduced weight norms or increased sparsity, but rather to the discovery of good subnetworks. Furthermore, we find that grokked tickets exhibit periodic weight patterns, beneficial graph properties such as increased average path lengths and reduced clustering coefficients, and undergo rapid structural changes that coincide with improvements in generalization. Additionally, pruning techniques like the edge-popup algorithm can identify these effective structures without modifying the weights, thereby transforming memorizing networks into generalizing ones. These results underscore the novel insight that structural exploration plays a pivotal role in understanding grokking. The implementation code can be accessed via this link: https://github.com/gouki510/Grokking-Tickets.
title Bridging Lottery Ticket and Grokking: Understanding Grokking from Inner Structure of Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19470