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Main Authors: Peleg, Amit, Hein, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03848
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author Peleg, Amit
Hein, Matthias
author_facet Peleg, Amit
Hein, Matthias
contents Neural networks typically generalize well when fitting the data perfectly, even though they are heavily overparameterized. Many factors have been pointed out as the reason for this phenomenon, including an implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and a possible simplicity bias arising from the neural network architecture. The goal of this paper is to disentangle the factors that influence generalization stemming from optimization and architectural choices by studying random and SGD-optimized networks that achieve zero training error. We experimentally show, in the low sample regime, that overparameterization in terms of increasing width is beneficial for generalization, and this benefit is due to the bias of SGD and not due to an architectural bias. In contrast, for increasing depth, overparameterization is detrimental for generalization, but random and SGD-optimized networks behave similarly, so this can be attributed to an architectural bias. For more information, see https://bias-sgd-or-architecture.github.io .
format Preprint
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publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent or the Architecture: Disentangling the Effects of Overparameterization of Neural Networks
Peleg, Amit
Hein, Matthias
Machine Learning
Neural networks typically generalize well when fitting the data perfectly, even though they are heavily overparameterized. Many factors have been pointed out as the reason for this phenomenon, including an implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and a possible simplicity bias arising from the neural network architecture. The goal of this paper is to disentangle the factors that influence generalization stemming from optimization and architectural choices by studying random and SGD-optimized networks that achieve zero training error. We experimentally show, in the low sample regime, that overparameterization in terms of increasing width is beneficial for generalization, and this benefit is due to the bias of SGD and not due to an architectural bias. In contrast, for increasing depth, overparameterization is detrimental for generalization, but random and SGD-optimized networks behave similarly, so this can be attributed to an architectural bias. For more information, see https://bias-sgd-or-architecture.github.io .
title Bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent or the Architecture: Disentangling the Effects of Overparameterization of Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03848