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arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06451 , year=

9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

9 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We consider two questions at the heart of machine learning; how can we predict if a minimum will generalize to the test set, and why does stochastic gradient descent find minima that generalize well? Our work responds to Zhang et al. (2016), who showed deep neural networks can easily memorize randomly labeled training data, despite generalizing well on real labels of the same inputs. We show that the same phenomenon occurs in small linear models. These observations are explained by the Bayesian evidence, which penalizes sharp minima but is invariant to model parameterization. We also demonstrate that, when one holds the learning rate fixed, there is an optimum batch size which maximizes the test set accuracy. We propose that the noise introduced by small mini-batches drives the parameters towards minima whose evidence is large. Interpreting stochastic gradient descent as a stochastic differential equation, we identify the "noise scale" $g = \epsilon (\frac{N}{B} - 1) \approx \epsilon N/B$, where $\epsilon$ is the learning rate, $N$ the training set size and $B$ the batch size. Consequently the optimum batch size is proportional to both the learning rate and the size of the training set, $B_{opt} \propto \epsilon N$. We verify these predictions empirically.

representative citing papers

The physics of AI weather models

physics.ao-ph · 2026-05-22 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AI weather models may simulate the atmosphere via particle positions in latent space whose updates follow gradient flow on a learned free energy functional rather than conventional physical equations.

Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empirically

cs.LG · 2017-12-01 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Deep learning generalization error follows power-law scaling with training set size across multiple domains, with model size scaling sublinearly with data size.

Scaling Laws for Transfer

cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

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Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.