Statistical Vignettes on the Grokking Phenomenon
In this work, we study grokking in a simple, analytically tractable setting whose rich phenomenology allows us to disentangle the effects of initialization, signal strength, weight decay, sample size, and input dimension. These factors can produce superficially similar learning curves through distinct mechanisms, complicating their interpretation. Our analysis distinguishes early fitting through nuisance features, core feature learning, and delayed generalization. We identify sharp conditions under which grokking provably occurs and derive analytic asymptotic expressions for the lengths of the generalization plateaus. Our results also characterize regimes of early generalization and failu...
| Authors | Baye Malick Gning, Elvis Dohmatob |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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