I generally regard grokking as a failure mode in a lot of cases -- it's oftentimes not really a good thing. It tends to indicate that the combination of your network, task, and data are poorly suited for learning {XYZ} thing. There are emergent traits which I think the network can learn in a healthy manner over training, and I think that tends to fall under the 'generalization' umbrella.

Though I'd strongly prefer to call it 'transitive' rather than 'compositional' in terms of generalization, as transitive is the formal term most disciplines use for such things, compositional is a different, more general meaning entirely. Similarly, I'd replace 'parametric' and 'non-parametric' with 'internal' and 'external', etc. Sloughing through the definition salad of words (this paper alone takes up roughly half of the top Kagi hits for 'parametric memory') makes actually interpreting an argument more difficult.

One reinterpretation of the problem is -- of course external memory models will have trouble generalizing to certain things like models relying on internal memory do! This is because, in part, models with internal memory will have much more 'experience' integrating the examples that they've seen, whereas, for an external-memory model like a typical RAG setup, anything is possible.

But, that being said, I don't think you can necessarily isolate that to the type of memory that the model has alone, i.e., I don't think you can clearly say even in a direct comparison between the two motifs that it's the kind of memory itself (internal vs. external) that is to blame for this. I think that might end up leading down some unfruitful research paths if so.

That said, one positive about this paper is the fact that they seem to have found a general circuit that forms for their task, and analyze that, I believe that has value, but (and I know I tend to be harsh on papers generally) the rest of the paper seems to be more of a distraction.

Definitional salad buffets and speculation about the 'in' topics are going to be the things that make the headlines, but in order to make real progress, focusing on the fundamentals is really what's necessary here, I think. They may seem 'boring' a lot of the times, but they've certainly helped me quite a bit in my research. <3 :'))))

There are certainly tradeoffs to both, the general transformer motif scales very well on a number of axis, so that may be the dominant algorithm for a while to come, though almost certainly it will change and evolve as time goes along (and who knows? something else may come along as well <3 :')))) ).

I can't speak to it in general, that's just my 2c on the matter/issue without really knowing too terribly much about the game (or game development in generally, really, I'm just a consumer here! XD). <3 :'))))

96 legitimately is pretty hard, i struggled doing it even in 2 minutes, so seeing it in 45 seconds is crazy. definitely gets exponentially harder for every fraction of a percent, so i think that's a pretty big achievement to hit :D

Hence why I think it might be hard to accurately compare them, likely SGD and Adam/AdamW are going to have better potential top ends but are going to get more thrashed in public comparisons vs an optimizer that seems to perform more flatly overall. Aaron works at FAIR so I am assuming that he knows this, I reached out with some concerns on my end a little bit before he published the optimizer but didn't hear back either unfortunately.

Additionally, the optimizer does actually appear to have a kind of momentum, despite claims directly saying the contrary, and uses it with a nesterov-like step (line 2 of 3 in the inner loop). Finally, it is 'schedule-free' because the schedule is actually hardcoded into the algorithm itself -- 1./steps_taken which is not necessarily a rare learning rate schedule. This is a decently robust but sometimes suboptimal schedule, and I find it sketchy to make claims that it is 'schedule-free'. This also cripples the optimizer by tying performance to the number of steps taken -- which is potentially a problem if you are using any batchsize+lr scaling strategies as I understand.

There is a mixture of hype and substance here, and I wish the author was more straightforward with their approach and claims. I think there is the potential for a good "bolts-included" optimizer with some of the ideas being presented here, but the amount of overhyping and deception makes me not want to trust any of the following work coming.

Unfortunately, hype is what sells best on Twitter, and some of the claims being made here appear to be at the very best deceptive, and at the very worst, untrue. I could be wrong -- these are just my personal opinions from my own experience, but I do occasionally find myself distraught about the things that tend to catch wind in the technical news cycle.

-Fern

If you know anyone that would help chip in for the Phase 2 of the project (scaling up, please let Nat know! (not directly affiliated with the project management team, just pointing to him as a great contact for that.... <3 :')))) ) )

The bridge comes when people connect concepts to those that are well known and well understood, and that is good. It is all well and good to say in theory that rediscovering things is bad -- it is not necessarily! But when it becomes groundhog day for years on end without significant theoretical change, then that is an indicator that something is amiss in general in how we learn and interpret information in the field.

Of course, this is just my crotchety young opinion coming up on 9 years in the field, so please take that that with a grain of salt and all that.

That said, the experiments seem very thorough, on a first pass/initial cursory examination, I appreciate the amount of detail that seemed to go into them.

The tradeoff between learning existing theory, and attempting to re-derive it from scratch, I think, is a hard tradeoff, as not having the traditional foundation allows for the discovery of new things, but having it allows for a deeper understanding of certain phenomena. There is a tradeoff either way.

I've seen several people here in the comments seemingly shocked that a model that maximizes the log likelihood of a sequence given the data somehow does not magically deviate from that behavior when run in inference. It's a density estimation model, do you want it to magically recite Shakespeare from the void?

Please! Let's stick to the basics, it will help experiments like this make much more sense as there already is a very clear mathematical foundation which clearly explains it (and said emergent phenomena).

If you want more specifics, there are several layers, Shannon's treatment of ergodic systems is a good start (though there is some minor deviation from that here, but it likely is a 'close enough' match to what's happening here to be properly instructive to the reader about the general dynamics of what is going on, overall.)

"State subjective perspective as objective fact. Cast shame upon the OP for not pre-aligning with said belief. Put the responsibility on the OP to prove that they are not deserving of shame."

I grew up in an environment where this kind communication was sort of the default, hence why I was curious and wanted to drill down a bit and give it some thought. Of course, many people agree that Twitter is more unhealthy than healthy. But that's not entirely the point here, I think.

It is not at all necessarily surprising, I think, from a purely high-level perspective, but I do personally think that I find that it is good to have the analysis. From a purely professional standpoint, I do not believe it is unique or distinctive enough as an individual method to need its own separate name for day-to-day use. From a personal perspective, however, I thought the mad cow disease reference was hilarious and applaud whoever came up with the acronym.

I find the benefit in the analysis, and the concerns presented about generated data being present in the data makes sense to me (and if in sufficient quantity, would make sense as biasing the models improperly in a rather significant kind of way).

I particularly enjoyed the humor of this line, the tongue-in-cheek nature is very funny/nice to me here:

"Ascertaining whether an autophagous loop has gone MAD or not (recall Definition 2.1) requires that we measure how far the synthesized data distribution Gt has drifted from the true data distribution Pr over the generations t."

I like their use of color in the paper, I saw a similar orange/green color scheme earlier today and enjoyed it very much as an annotation method.

"A fixed real dataset only slows generative model degradation" is again also a natural consequence of Shannon's noisy channel capacity theorem, one can say that with almost nearly perfect certainty that a limited neural network will not be able to perfectly fit the distribution of the data that it is training on, thus it will have bias, variance, or some combination of both, limited ultimately by the model's capacity itself.

This w.r.t. the original dataset is noise, and we can choose between whether we want collapse, or recursively encoding the noise patterns of the previous model (which might happen to have an additive effect, or maybe not! Who knows! I do not know for sure here, I have not yet figured this one out myself yet).

w.r.t. the real data slowing down degradation, if we are sampling I.I.D. of course then proportionately we still should see some degradation as this is the nature of empirical risk minimization over maximum likelihood estimation. It is still good that they have shown this, however, I thinks.

The fresh data loop, I believe, would be an example of actually a kind of noise in and of itself, w.r.t. the original input dataset, and as long as this 'noise' (from the perspective of the model) has a higher SNR than the (potentially slow) collapse of the model's output distribution, then it should (in some kind of proportion at leasts) be constantly-playing 'keep-up' with the fresh data.

"First, we find that—regardless of the performance of early generations—the performance of later generations converges to a point that depends only on the amounts of real and synthetic data in the training loop. " -- there we are (I saw this after making the SNR point, this makes sense within this framework of interpretation, then.

All in all, I found this paper very aware of itself and what it was studying, it was well-laid out and accessible, and while the points are not necessarily earth-shattering (though I still have to read through some of it, I think), having clear empirical evidence about this phenomenon, detailing it, and cutting away through the forest of (at-least-seemingly) untested battlegrounds is one that I appreciated.

Curious to hear what others think about this one. <3 :'))))

Unfortunately, with where my past is, a whole lot of my family too has the idea that I'm living a distorted life, and that this needs to be corrected (almost as a first priority thing). There's almost an Animal-Farm-istic "All sins are equal, but some sins are more equal than others" kind of thing going on there, if you catch what I mean.

Intellectually, I think many of them can understand how this is not really the most rational thing given the on-paper beliefs, but emotionally, it's a very different story, and the emotions seem to win out on that front.

Answering the basics isn't too terrible for me, though it definitely can be a problem if it's the only focus (and if the conversation inevitably keeps looping around to that singular topic. I am a freaking human being, darnmnitall!!)

Like, sure, sometimes it is good bonding, and sometimes it's not, it's very much context dependent.

If having the emotional security of not being in the hotseat answering questions from family members is necessary for an amount of emotional security on the OP's part, then I would consider that to be a good strategy. It might not be what you would do in that scenario, which is okay, as you and OP are different and might have different methods of addressing and meeting your respective emotional needs.

I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)

So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))