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arXiv · 2410.07041

Emergent properties with repeated examples

François Charton·Julia Kempe
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Abstract

We study the performance of transformers as a function of the number of repetitions of training examples with algorithmically generated datasets. On three problems of mathematics: the greatest common divisor, modular multiplication, and matrix eigenvalues, we show that for a fixed number of training steps, models trained on smaller sets of repeated examples outperform models trained on larger sets of single-use examples. We also demonstrate that two-set training - repeated use of a small random subset of examples, along normal sampling on the rest of the training set - provides for faster learning and better performance. This highlights that the benefits of repetition can outweigh those of data diversity. These datasets and problems provide a controlled setting to shed light on the still poorly understood interplay between generalization and memorization in deep learning.

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François Charton, Julia Kempe. 2024-10-09. Emergent properties with repeated examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07041

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