Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2024 (ICLR 2024) Conference
Nirmit Joshi, Gal Vardi, Nathan Srebro
Understanding how overparameterized neural networks generalize despite perfect interpolation of noisy training data is a fundamental question. Mallinar et. al. (2022) noted that neural networks seem to often exhibit ``tempered overfitting'', wherein the population risk does not converge to the Bayes optimal error, but neither does it approach infinity, yielding non-trivial generalization. However, this has not been studied rigorously. We provide the first rigorous analysis of the overfiting behaviour of regression with minimum norm ($\ell_2$ of weights), focusing on univariate two-layer ReLU networks. We show overfitting is tempered (with high probability) when measured with respect to the $L_1$ loss, but also show that the situation is more complex than suggested by Mallinar et. al., and overfitting is catastrophic with respect to the $L_2$ loss, or when taking an expectation over the training set.