Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hurts Generalization

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2412.07684 v1 pith:NJQYVUXQ submitted 2024-12-10 cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML

The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hurts Generalization

classification cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML
keywords memorizationgeneralizationexplanationswhencorrelationslearnpatternspoor
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explanations.This behavior leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations rely on spurious correlations. In this work, we formalize the interplay between memorization and generalization, showing that spurious correlations would particularly lead to poor generalization when are combined with memorization. Memorization can reduce training loss to zero, leaving no incentive to learn robust, generalizable patterns. To address this, we propose memorization-aware training (MAT), which uses held-out predictions as a signal of memorization to shift a model's logits. MAT encourages learning robust patterns invariant across distributions, improving generalization under distribution shifts.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Unlearning with Asymmetric Sources: Improved Unlearning-Utility Trade-off with Public Data

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Asymmetric Langevin Unlearning uses public data to suppress unlearning noise costs by O(1/n_pub²), enabling practical mass unlearning with preserved utility under distribution mismatch.

  2. Unlearning with Asymmetric Sources: Improved Unlearning-Utility Trade-off with Public Data

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ALU uses public data to suppress unlearning cost quadratically while characterizing distribution mismatch effects, enabling mass unlearning with maintained utility.

  3. Mitigating Spurious Correlations with Memorization-Guided Dataset De-Biasing

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Proposes memorization-guided two-stage scoring to select debiased training subsets, enabling ERM models to achieve better performance than SOTA debiasing techniques using only 10% of data.

  4. Memorization in Graph Neural Networks

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    GNNs memorize node labels more on low-homophily graphs, a behavior NCMemo can quantify and graph rewiring can partially mitigate.

  5. Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time

    cs.LG 2024-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Titans combine attention for current context with a learnable neural memory for long-term history, achieving better performance and scaling to over 2M-token contexts on language, reasoning, genomics, and time-series tasks.