OUI Need to Talk About Weight Decay: A New Perspective on Overfitting Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fernández-Hernández, Alberto, Mestre, Jose I., Dolz, Manuel F., Duato, Jose, Quintana-Ortí, Enrique S.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Fernández-Hernández, Alberto
Mestre, Jose I.
Dolz, Manuel F.
Duato, Jose
Quintana-Ortí, Enrique S.
author_facet Fernández-Hernández, Alberto
Mestre, Jose I.
Dolz, Manuel F.
Duato, Jose
Quintana-Ortí, Enrique S.
contents We introduce the Overfitting-Underfitting Indicator (OUI), a novel tool for monitoring the training dynamics of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and identifying optimal regularization hyperparameters. Specifically, we validate that OUI can effectively guide the selection of the Weight Decay (WD) hyperparameter by indicating whether a model is overfitting or underfitting during training without requiring validation data. Through experiments on DenseNet-BC-100 with CIFAR- 100, EfficientNet-B0 with TinyImageNet and ResNet-34 with ImageNet-1K, we show that maintaining OUI within a prescribed interval correlates strongly with improved generalization and validation scores. Notably, OUI converges significantly faster than traditional metrics such as loss or accuracy, enabling practitioners to identify optimal WD (hyperparameter) values within the early stages of training. By leveraging OUI as a reliable indicator, we can determine early in training whether the chosen WD value leads the model to underfit the training data, overfit, or strike a well-balanced trade-off that maximizes validation scores. This enables more precise WD tuning for optimal performance on the tested datasets and DNNs. All code for reproducing these experiments is available at https://github.com/AlbertoFdezHdez/OUI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_17160
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OUI Need to Talk About Weight Decay: A New Perspective on Overfitting Detection
Fernández-Hernández, Alberto
Mestre, Jose I.
Dolz, Manuel F.
Duato, Jose
Quintana-Ortí, Enrique S.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We introduce the Overfitting-Underfitting Indicator (OUI), a novel tool for monitoring the training dynamics of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and identifying optimal regularization hyperparameters. Specifically, we validate that OUI can effectively guide the selection of the Weight Decay (WD) hyperparameter by indicating whether a model is overfitting or underfitting during training without requiring validation data. Through experiments on DenseNet-BC-100 with CIFAR- 100, EfficientNet-B0 with TinyImageNet and ResNet-34 with ImageNet-1K, we show that maintaining OUI within a prescribed interval correlates strongly with improved generalization and validation scores. Notably, OUI converges significantly faster than traditional metrics such as loss or accuracy, enabling practitioners to identify optimal WD (hyperparameter) values within the early stages of training. By leveraging OUI as a reliable indicator, we can determine early in training whether the chosen WD value leads the model to underfit the training data, overfit, or strike a well-balanced trade-off that maximizes validation scores. This enables more precise WD tuning for optimal performance on the tested datasets and DNNs. All code for reproducing these experiments is available at https://github.com/AlbertoFdezHdez/OUI.
title OUI Need to Talk About Weight Decay: A New Perspective on Overfitting Detection
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17160