Puzzling Success of Overparameterization: Lottery Tickets or Escape Dimensions?
infoscience.epfl.ch
infoscience.epfl.ch
Sometimes the solution needs one of the planes to make a big change to its orientation. and in the process of doing so the fitness will go down. Now if some other plane happened, by luck, to be in a better position to get to that state without lowering the fitness, then it will generally dominate over the other one, and the first one would start to "evolve" to be suppressed by the other one. The first one then becomes (usually, but not always) pretty much dead. Since the network has a fixed number of weights, it can't decide to just "add another plane". It has to make do with a fixed number of them. If too much of them become useless your training can't really recover, you're stuck at that minimum. The overparametrization allows for a bigger chance that some other plane's orientation will happen to be in a position to shadow counterproductive ones.
One intuitive way of looking at it is like so - let's say that you have a gaussian-looking plot. You want to fit a gaussian. You have a stupid simple model where you can slide your gaussian left and right.
If your initial starting point happens to be roughly within range, great, your optimizer will take care of it for you and slide it into the correct place. If you're too far, too bad, no meaningful gradient.
Instead, neural nets give you the option to spawn a gaussian anywhere you please. In this case, no sliding is necessary, but it comes at a heavy parametrization cost.
1. Avoid overparameterization by design. Manually create or choose a space of functions that has limited degrees of freedom by construction.
2. Accept overparameterization and regularize.
The latter tends to be more robust, because of the bitter lesson. It's not practical to manually design an ideal, on-demand, just-right limited-parameter model for every dataset we are presented with. The best way to approach that ideal, it turns out, is really to just let the computer figure it out via regularized optimization over an overparameterized space.
Statisticians started moving in favor of overparameterization long before deep learning got off the ground. This trend dates back at least to the machine learning bible, Elements of Statistical Learning (2001).
Could you elaborate on this?
However, most of their example datasets are small, and they use complicated models, so it's sort of implicit.
They definitely don't mention double descent though.
What if that could be automated?
It's not more popular for a few reasons: 1) you first need to train a full general model anyhow 2) interpretability is nontrivial and not guaranteed 3) once you make the architectural changes, you can't commit to that architecture as you might miss out in the future with more advancements 4) with modern transformers, there is limited amount of architectural "play" happening.
This seems circular? Over-parametrisation and stochastic gradient decent provides automatic regularisation, and it turns out this regularisation is very good in practice. The bitter lesson is simply the a restatement of the empirical observation that this specific regularisation often works great, it doesn't come with any explanation.
First a couple of facts:
1) An ANN works by learning decision boundaries that separate and group training samples and their associated labels.
2) If you train an overparametized net on random data then it will memorize it, but if you train it on consistently labelled structured data lying on some lower dimensional manifold, then rather than memorizing it, it will instead generalize, so the behavior depends on the nature of the data it is trained on.
Now the hand-wavy bit:
As training progresses the weights move the decision surfaces around until each training sample maps to a region of output space corresponding to the correct label, with these regions of output/latent space being separated by the learnt decision surfaces.
Initially during training (up to the double descent phase in cases where that happens) these regions of "gerrymandered" output space may only correspond to a single or very few training samples, so there may be multiple disconnected regions each mapping to the label "cat", and another group of disconnected regions each mapping to the label "dog". This is the the overfitting phase.
Now, if the data permits, with the data manifold being consistently labelled (nothing that looks like a cat being labelled a dog), there will often be potential to merge some of these disconnected regions of output space that map to the same label. So, for example we might go from four small regions of "cat" space to two larger merged regions of "cat" space. This is the mechanism of generalization with the extra space contained by the merged regions corresponding to interpolation - no training samples "forced" those larger merged regions, but also none prevented it ("dog" that looks like a cat).
The question then remains why the dynamics of training may cause the decision surfaces to initially be highly "gerrimanderd" (because it's easier?), but on continued training to merge (because without any dogs among the cats there is no reason not to, and once merged no label error causing them to unmerge - a ratcheting up process from smaller to larger regions with increasing generalization?).
What's more interesting is as to why double descent happens