In plain words: As a model grows, test error first gets worse, then better again — a second dip past the usual point where bigger starts to hurt. The same pattern appears with training time, and in some cases even quadrupling the training data makes results worse.
Abstract
We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a "double-descent" phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better. Moreover, we show that double descent occurs not just as a function of model size, but also as a function of the number of training epochs. We unify the above phenomena by defining a new complexity measure we call the effective model complexity and conjecture a generalized double descent with respect to this measure. Furthermore, our notion of model complexity allows us to identify certain regimes where increasing (even quadrupling) the number of train samples actually hurts test performance.
Preetum Nakkiran, Gal Kaplun, Yamini Bansal, Tristan Yang, Boaz Barak, Ilya Sutskever
arXiv:1912.02292 · cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.NE, stat.ML · submitted Dec 4, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · G.K. and Y.B. contributed equally