[Submitted on 15 Feb 2024]
Abstract:Neural networks offer good approximation to many tasks but consistently fail to reach perfect generalization, even when theoretical work shows that such perfect solutions can be expressed by certain architectures. Using the task of formal language learning, we focus on one simple formal language and show that the theoretically correct solution is in fact not an optimum of commonly used objectives — even with regularization techniques that according to common wisdom should lead to simple weights and good generalization (L1, L2) or other meta-heuristics (early-stopping, dropout). However, replacing standard targets with the Minimum Description Length objective (MDL) results in the correct solution being an optimum.
Submission history
From: Nur Lan [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:25:30 UTC (1,766 KB)
