REVIEW 4 major objections 4 minor 1 cited by
Representations Shape Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Predictions
T0 review · 4 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-09 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Weak-to-strong generalization reduces to an overlap of two representation kernels.
desk verdict A genuinely new theoretical handle on W2SG, but the empirical validation doesn't verify the key assumption, so treat the headline correlations as suggestive not conclusive. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the pair of matrices $\boldsymbol{P}_w$ and $\boldsymbol{P}_s$, defined as $\frac{1}{\hat{n}}\hat{\boldsymbol{K}}(\Pi_{V_w} h_w)(\frac{1}{\hat{n}}\hat{\boldsymbol{K}}(\Pi_{V_w} h_w)+(\beta_w+\tilde{\gamma}_w)\boldsymbol{I})^{-1}$, and similarly for $s$ with $\beta_s+\hat{\gamma}_s$. Each is a regularized projection onto the span of a principal kernel, i.e., the kernel matrix formed by evaluating the model's representation restricted to its well-concentrated principal subspace. The key identity carrying the argument is Theorem 3.8, which expresses the prediction gap as the norm of the weak model's error after the strong model's projection. The mechanism is an overlap: errors in the weak model's output that fall in the span of the strong model's principal kernel are replicated by the weak-to-strong model, while errors landing in the strong model's non-principal directions are fitted or ignored without affecting test error.
What would settle it
Run the linear-probing setup of Experiment I on a single dataset, compute the left-hand side $\mathrm{PredGap}$ directly from the two fitted models' predictions and the right-hand side $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}/\sqrt{\hat{n}}\|^2$ from the same representations; if the difference does not shrink toward zero as $\hat{n}$ grows, or is not small at practical sample sizes within the assumed regime, the theorem's central equality is false. A cheaper check is to hold $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\|_{\mathrm{op}}$ fixed across weak teachers whose label-noise structures differ and see whether W2SG error stays constant, as the theory requires.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
On the paper's own terms, the central discovery is Theorem 3.8: under a $(\delta,\hat{\gamma},\tilde{\gamma})$-decomposability assumption on both representations, the prediction gap between the weak-to-strong model and the strong ceiling model decomposes as $\mathrm{PredGap} = \|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}/\sqrt{\hat{n}}\|^2 \pm o(1)$ with high probability. Here $\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}$ collects the true finetuning labels, while $\boldsymbol{P}_w$ and $\boldsymbol{P}_s$ are regularized scaled projections onto the spans of the principal kernels, meaning the kernel matrices computed from the parts of the representations that are well concentrated on their principal subspaces. The operator $\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)$ thus selects precisely what the weak model is unable to learn but the strong model can learn through its principal representations. The paper further proves a general condition for benign overfitting in this setting (Theorem 4.1) and derives two label-free upper bounds on the prediction gap, both governed by $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\|_{\mathrm{op}}$ or the $\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\boldsymbol{P}_s$ variant, which it then validates empirically.
Load-bearing premise
Everything rests on the assumption that each model's representations separate cleanly into a concentrated 'principal' part and a nearly structureless residual part; if real LLM representations do not separate this way, the formula and the metric have no guarantee.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Prediction gaps can be bounded without labels: Corollary 5.1 gives $\mathrm{PredGap} \leq C\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\|_{\mathrm{op}}^2+o(1)$, so ranking candidate weak teachers by this operator norm should track weak-to-strong quality.
- Which weak-supervision errors are corrected is determined by geometry: errors in the strong model's principal span are replicated, errors outside it are not, regardless of whether the strong model overfits them.
- Benign overfitting in W2SG has a single driving quantity: when the strong model's non-principal kernel is nearly isotropic ($\delta_s=o(\hat{\gamma}_s)$) and $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\hat{\boldsymbol{y}}/\sqrt{\hat{n}}\|^2$ is small, the W2S model can fit the weak labels almost perfectly yet beat the weak teacher.
- A stronger weak model shrinks the gap, all else equal: because a larger span for $\boldsymbol{P}_w$ leaves less room for $\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)$, the formula predicts monotone improvement in W2SG as weak representations cover more of the label space.
- The metric transfers beyond the linear-probing setting: the empirical correlations hold for CE-trained classifiers and for full LLM fine-tuning when activation-map representations are used heuristically, not just for the linear-regression setup of the theorem.
Reading between the lines
- Inference: because the metric measures only representation geometry, it suggests a practical selection rule—among candidate weak supervisors with similar downstream accuracy, choose the one with the smallest $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\|_{\mathrm{op}}$—which the paper does not explicitly propose.
- Inference: the same two-kernel overlap may describe other forms of weak supervision, such as knowledge distillation or human preference feedback, whenever the teacher's errors can be expressed through representations; this is an extrapolation, not a claim of the paper.
- Inference: the empirical correlation in end-to-end fine-tuning could in principle be driven by confounds such as model size or pretraining quality rather than the stated kernel overlap; a controlled experiment that equalizes these dimensions while varying only $\|\boldsymbol{P}_s(\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{P}_w)\|_{\mathrm{op}}$ would sharpen the causal reading.
- Inference: replacing activation-map heuristics with gradient-based kernels (e.g., NTK-style linearizations of fine-tuning) could make the metric applicable during training itself and may improve its accuracy for full-model fine-tuning.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper studies weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) in a fixed-representation linear-regression setting. It introduces a decomposability condition (Def. 3.3) on representation kernels and proves (Thm. 3.8) that the prediction gap between the strong model trained on weak labels and the strong ceiling is, up to o(1), the squared norm of P_s(I-P_w)(1/√n)y_hat, where P_w and P_s are ridge-regularized projection matrices onto the principal kernels of the weak and strong representations. From this it derives upper bounds (Cors. 5.1, 5.2) and a practical metric ||P_s(I-P_w)||_op, with heuristics substituting PCA thresholds and an effective regularization beta_eff for the theoretical quantities. Experiments on molecular transformers, embedding models, and 52 LLMs report strong Spearman correlations between the metric and W2S test error, and a benign-overfitting case study is developed in Sec. 4.
Significance. If the main theorem is correct, it gives a mechanistic, representation-level account of when a strong model will or will not replicate its weak supervisor's errors, and it connects W2SG to benign overfitting. The derivation is self-contained: P_w and P_s are defined from the data, and the proof proceeds through the closed-form ridge solution and hat-matrix lemmas (A.12, A.13). The metric is a norm of a product of these matrices, not a fitted value, and the empirical scope (8 datasets, 150 transformers, 52 LLMs) is a genuine strength. The main weaknesses are empirical: the key decomposability assumption is not checked on the actual models, and the reported correlations for Exp. III are best-case over hyperparameters tuned per dataset. These weaknesses are fixable with diagnostics and a cleaner evaluation protocol, so I regard the work as promising but not yet fully supported.
major comments (4)
- [Definition 3.3 / Theorem 3.8, App. A.7] Theorem 3.8's equality is conditional on Assumption 3.7: both representations must be (δ, γhat, γtilde)-decomposable, which requires the residual (non-principal) kernel to satisfy near-isotropy (condition (c)), small cross-sample inner products (condition (d)), and vanishing population covariance (condition (e)). The empirical metric in Sec. 5 replaces V with a PCA or variance threshold and uses activation maps for Exp. III, but the paper never reports any of the quantities in Def. 3.3 for the actual models. On real transformer and LLM activations, the residual subspace after eigenvalue thresholding is likely to contain structured, task-relevant features whose kernel is far from γhat I, in which case the o(1) terms in Thm. 3.8 can dominate and the correlation between ||P_s(I-P_w)||_op and Err_w2s need not reflect the mechanism in the theorem. I request a concrete diagnostic: for the representations used in Exps. I-III, report the relative isotropy error ||(1/n)K(Π_{V⊥}h) - γhat I||_op / γhat, the cross-sample norm in condition (d), and an empirical proxy for ||Σ(Π_{V⊥}h)||_op across the weak models, and show they are small, or provide a perturbation argument showing Thm. 3.8 is robust to their failure.
- [Sec. 5.4 and App. D.2] The empirical claim that the metric is 'without requiring labels' is weakened by the evaluation protocol. App. D.2 states that in Exp. III the hyperparameters α and β are tuned per dataset 'reporting the best result', i.e., selected by maximizing the correlation with Err_w2s, which uses the labels whose absence is advertised. The main-text figures for Exp. III therefore report best-case correlations, not predictions under a fixed or held-out hyperparameter choice. App. D.2 does provide a cross-model transfer experiment, but only for Exp. II (Table 2). I request that all three experiments report correlations under a pre-specified or cross-validated hyperparameter choice (e.g., selected on half the weak models and evaluated on the other half), and that the text qualify the 'label-free' claim accordingly.
- [Example 3.5 and Theorem 3.6, App. C.2.1] The stated scalings do not in general imply condition (c) of Def. 3.3. For the sub-Gaussian spiked model with residual variance σ²/(d-k), the residual Gram matrix satisfies ||(1/n)K(Π_{V⊥}h) - (σ²/n)I||_op = (σ²/n)·||(1/(d-k))Z^T Z - I||_op, which is of order (σ²/n)·√(n/(d-k)) by Lemma C.3. Condition (c) with δ=0 requires this to be o((σ²/n)²). With d=ω(n²) and σ²=O(n), this need not hold when σ² is small (e.g., σ²=1); one would need d-k = ω(n³/σ⁴) or σ²=Ω(n). The same issue affects Theorem 3.6, where m=ω(n²) is assumed. The examples should either be restated with a stronger scaling that actually satisfies Def. 3.3, or condition (c) must be relaxed with a correspondingly revised proof.
- [Sec. 5.4, Figs. 2-5] The paper positions ||P_s(I-P_w)||_op as capturing the specific geometric overlap between the complement of the weak principal kernel and the strong principal kernel. The reported correlations, however, could conceivably be driven by a generic 'better weak representation' factor: P_w appears directly in the metric, and any improvement in the weak model both reduces the norm and improves Err_w2s. The paper compares against dimension-based baselines (Fig. 5) but not against the weak model's own test error, ||P_w||_op, or the principal-subspace dimension of the weak model. I request baseline comparisons or partial correlations that control for these simpler quantities, so that the specificity of the P_s(I-P_w) mechanism is supported.
minor comments (4)
- [Lemma A.12] In the statement and proof of Lemma A.12, the second factor of P_w uses 1/˜n, but for consistency with the definition in Sec. 3.4 and with the push-through step later in the proof, it should be 1/ˆn; please correct this typo.
- [Sec. 2] The sentence 'we explicitly links W2SG performance' in Sec. 2 should read 'we explicitly link W2SG performance'.
- [Sec. 5.4] The Spearman correlations are reported without uncertainty intervals or p-values; given that Exps. II and III have only 22-28 points per dataset, I recommend adding bootstrap confidence intervals or a permutation-based p-value.
- [Abstract and Sec. 5.1] The phrase 'without requiring labels' is too strong because App. D.2 admits that labels are used to select the hyperparameters. Please qualify the claim as, for example, 'without labels for the metric itself once its few hyperparameters are fixed'.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the main theorem is a self-contained derivation from ridge-regression algebra, and the empirical metric is an approximation of the theorem's hat matrices rather than a fitted surrogate.
full rationale
The central claim is an algebraic consequence of ridge-regression closed forms. Under Assumption 3.7, Lemma A.12 rewrites the weak model's normalized error on the strong finetuning set as (I - P_w) * yhat / sqrt(nhat) + o(1), and Lemma A.13 rewrites the strong model's error-propagation operator as P_s, so Theorem 3.8 follows by substitution into the PredGap expression of Eq. (5). The quantities P_w and P_s are defined directly from the principal kernel matrices and the regularization constants; they are not fitted values, and the o(1) terms are controlled by the stated decomposability conditions rather than by calibration to the predicted gap. Corollaries 5.1 and 5.2 are norm bounds derived from the same theorem, and the empirical metric in Eq. (2) is an approximation of this algebraic object, not a fitted surrogate. The paper's use of hyperparameters alpha and beta_eff is a standard estimation choice, and the cross-model transfer experiment in Table 2 indicates the correlations are not imposed by construction. No load-bearing step is justified by a self-citation or by a uniqueness/ansatz citation; concerns about whether real LLM activations satisfy Assumption 3.7 concern the scope of the theorem, not the circularity of the derivation.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (4)
- alpha_w (PCA threshold for weak principal representations) =
0.1 (Exp I), 0.001 (Exp II), tuned in {0.02, 0.05} (Exp III)
- alpha_s (PCA threshold for strong principal representations) =
0.1 (Exp I), 0.05 (Exp II), tuned in {0.02, 0.05} (Exp III)
- beta_eff,w (effective regularization for weak) =
0.1 (Exp I), 0.0001 (Exp II), tuned in {0.2,0.5,0.8,1,2,4,8} (Exp III)
- beta_eff,s (effective regularization for strong) =
0.1 (Exp I), 0.01 (Exp II), tuned in {0.2,...,8} (Exp III)
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption Finetuning is equivalent to learning a linear function on fixed representations h (Sec 3.1).
- domain assumption Weak and strong representations are (δ,γhat,γtilde)-decomposable w.r.t. principal subspaces V_w and V_s (Assumption 3.7 / Def 3.3).
- domain assumption In Sec 4, the strong ceiling model is near-perfect (Err_sc = o(1)) and δ_s = o(γhat_s), allowing benign overfitting.
- ad hoc to paper In Exp III, layer-wise normalized activation maps of pretrained LLMs can serve as the representation h(x) for computing the metric.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Representations Shape Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Predictions." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/4YDLCXU5
@misc{pith2026250200620,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Representations Shape Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Predictions},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/4YDLCXU5}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2502.00620}
}
read the original abstract
Weak-to-Strong Generalization (W2SG), where a weak model supervises a stronger one, serves as an important analogy for understanding how humans might guide superhuman intelligence in the future. Promising empirical results revealed that a strong model can surpass its weak supervisor. While recent work has offered theoretical insights into this phenomenon, a clear understanding of the interactions between weak and strong models that drive W2SG remains elusive. We investigate W2SG through a theoretical lens and show that it can be characterized using kernels derived from the principal components of weak and strong models' internal representations. These kernels can be used to define a space that, at a high level, captures what the weak model is unable to learn but is learnable by the strong model. The projection of labels onto this space quantifies how much the strong model falls short of its full potential due to weak supervision. This characterization also provides insights into how certain errors in weak supervision can be corrected by the strong model, regardless of overfitting. Our theory has significant practical implications, providing a representation-based metric that predicts W2SG performance trends without requiring labels, as shown in experiments on molecular predictions with transformers and 5 NLP tasks involving 52 LLMs.
Figures
Figures from the paper (8 more)
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
-
On Weak-to-Strong Generalization and f-Divergence
Replacing cross-entropy with f-divergence losses in weak-to-strong generalization gives modest accuracy gains and improved label-noise tolerance, though the paper's theoretical equivalence result is constructed after ...
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
write newline
" write newline "" before.all 'output.state := FUNCTION n.dashify 't := "" t empty not t #1 #1 substring "-" = t #1 #2 substring "--" = not "--" * t #2 global.max substring 't := t #1 #1 substring "-" = "-" * t #2 global.max substring 't := while if t #1 #1 substring * t #2 global.max substring 't := if while FUNCTION format.date year duplicate empty "emp...
- [2]
-
[3]
Linear algebraic structure of word senses, with applications to polysemy
Arora, S., Li, Y., Liang, Y., Ma, T., and Risteski, A. Linear algebraic structure of word senses, with applications to polysemy. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6: 0 483--495, 2018
work page 2018
-
[4]
Bai, J., Bai, S., Chu, Y., Cui, Z., Dang, K., Deng, X., Fan, Y., Ge, W., Han, Y., Huang, F., et al. Qwen technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16609, 2023
arXiv 2023
-
[5]
L., Long, P
Bartlett, P. L., Long, P. M., Lugosi, G., and Tsigler, A. Benign overfitting in linear regression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 0 (48): 0 30063--30070, 2020
2020
-
[6]
Brown, N., Fiscato, M., Segler, M. H., and Vaucher, A. C. Guacamol: benchmarking models for de novo molecular design. Journal of chemical information and modeling, 59 0 (3): 0 1096--1108, 2019
work page 2019
-
[7]
H., Baker, B., Gao, L., Aschenbrenner, L., Chen, Y., Ecoffet, A., Joglekar, M., Leike, J., et al
Burns, C., Izmailov, P., Kirchner, J. H., Baker, B., Gao, L., Aschenbrenner, L., Chen, Y., Ecoffet, A., Joglekar, M., Leike, J., et al. Weak-to-strong generalization: Eliciting strong capabilities with weak supervision. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.09390, 2023
arXiv 2023
-
[8]
Quantifying the Gain in Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Charikar, M., Pabbaraju, C., and Shiragur, K. Quantifying the gain in weak-to-strong generalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.15116, 2024
work page Pith review arXiv 2024
Show all 55 references
-
[9]
Chembench: The molecule benchmarks and molmapnet datasets, September 2020
Charleshen. Chembench: The molecule benchmarks and molmapnet datasets, September 2020. URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4054866
2020 doi
-
[10]
The componentwise distance to the nearest singular matrix
Demmel, J. The componentwise distance to the nearest singular matrix. SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, 13 0 (1): 0 10--19, 1992
1992
-
[11]
Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding
Devlin, J. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805, 2018
2018 arXiv
-
[12]
Inversion error, condition number, and approximate inverses of uncertain matrices
El Ghaoui, L. Inversion error, condition number, and approximate inverses of uncertain matrices. Linear algebra and its applications, 343: 0 171--193, 2002
2002
-
[13]
Molecular representation learning with language models and domain-relevant auxiliary tasks
Fabian, B., Edlich, T., Gaspar, H., Segler, M., Meyers, J., Fiscato, M., and Ahmed, M. Molecular representation learning with language models and domain-relevant auxiliary tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.13230, 2020
2011 arXiv
-
[14]
Sparse coding in the primate cortex
Foldiak, P. Sparse coding in the primate cortex. The handbook of brain theory and neural networks, 2003
2003
-
[15]
S., and Bartlett, P
Frei, S., Chatterji, N. S., and Bartlett, P. Benign overfitting without linearity: Neural network classifiers trained by gradient descent for noisy linear data. In Conference on Learning Theory, pp.\ 2668--2703. PMLR, 2022
2022
-
[16]
Aligning ai with shared human values
Hendrycks, D., Burns, C., Basart, S., Critch, A., Li, J., Song, D., and Steinhardt, J. Aligning ai with shared human values. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.02275, 2020
2008 arXiv
-
[17]
L., Bhagavatula, C., and Choi, Y
Huang, L., Bras, R. L., Bhagavatula, C., and Choi, Y. Cosmos qa: Machine reading comprehension with contextual commonsense reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.00277, 2019
1909 arXiv
-
[18]
The low-rank simplicity bias in deep networks
Huh, M., Mobahi, H., Zhang, R., Cheung, B., Agrawal, P., and Isola, P. The low-rank simplicity bias in deep networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.10427, 2021
2021 arXiv
-
[19]
Neural tangent kernel: Convergence and generalization in neural networks
Jacot, A., Gabriel, F., and Hongler, C. Neural tangent kernel: Convergence and generalization in neural networks. Advances in neural information processing systems, 31, 2018
2018
-
[20]
Implicit regularization of random feature models
Jacot, A., Simsek, B., Spadaro, F., Hongler, C., and Gabriel, F. Implicit regularization of random feature models. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.\ 4631--4640. PMLR, 2020
2020
-
[21]
The power of contrast for feature learning: A theoretical analysis
Ji, W., Deng, Z., Nakada, R., Zou, J., and Zhang, L. The power of contrast for feature learning: A theoretical analysis. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 24 0 (330): 0 1--78, 2023
2023
-
[22]
Johnstone, I. M. On the distribution of the largest eigenvalue in principal components analysis. The Annals of statistics, 29 0 (2): 0 295--327, 2001
2001
-
[23]
Sgd on neural networks learns functions of increasing complexity
Kalimeris, D., Kaplun, G., Nakkiran, P., Edelman, B., Yang, T., Barak, B., and Zhang, H. Sgd on neural networks learns functions of increasing complexity. Advances in neural information processing systems, 32, 2019
2019
-
[24]
Kingma, D. P. Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980, 2014
2014 arXiv
-
[25]
Theoretical analysis of weak-to-strong generalization
Lang, H., Sontag, D., and Vijayaraghavan, A. Theoretical analysis of weak-to-strong generalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.16043, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[26]
Nv-embed: Improved techniques for training llms as generalist embedding models
Lee, C., Roy, R., Xu, M., Raiman, J., Shoeybi, M., Catanzaro, B., and Ping, W. Nv-embed: Improved techniques for training llms as generalist embedding models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.17428, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[27]
Sparse modeling for image and vision processing
Mairal, J., Bach, F., Ponce, J., et al. Sparse modeling for image and vision processing. Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision , 8 0 (2-3): 0 85--283, 2014
2014
-
[28]
A kernel-based view of language model fine-tuning
Malladi, S., Wettig, A., Yu, D., Chen, D., and Arora, S. A kernel-based view of language model fine-tuning. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.\ 23610--23641. PMLR, 2023
2023
-
[29]
Benign, tempered, or catastrophic: Toward a refined taxonomy of overfitting
Mallinar, N., Simon, J., Abedsoltan, A., Pandit, P., Belkin, M., and Nakkiran, P. Benign, tempered, or catastrophic: Toward a refined taxonomy of overfitting. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35: 0 1182--1195, 2022
2022
-
[30]
and Tegmark, M
Marks, S. and Tegmark, M. The geometry of truth: Emergent linear structure in large language model representations of true/false datasets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.06824, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[31]
Mteb: Massive text embedding benchmark
Muennighoff, N., Tazi, N., Magne, L., and Reimers, N. Mteb: Massive text embedding benchmark. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.07316, 2022
2022 arXiv
-
[32]
Classification vs regression in overparameterized regimes: Does the loss function matter? Journal of Machine Learning Research, 22 0 (222): 0 1--69, 2021
Muthukumar, V., Narang, A., Subramanian, V., Belkin, M., Hsu, D., and Sahai, A. Classification vs regression in overparameterized regimes: Does the loss function matter? Journal of Machine Learning Research, 22 0 (222): 0 1--69, 2021
2021
-
[33]
I., Deng, Z., Ji, W., Zou, J., and Zhang, L
Nakada, R., Gulluk, H. I., Deng, Z., Ji, W., Zou, J., and Zhang, L. Understanding multimodal contrastive learning and incorporating unpaired data. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pp.\ 4348--4380. PMLR, 2023
2023
-
[34]
Emergent linear representations in world models of self-supervised sequence models
Nanda, N., Lee, A., and Wattenberg, M. Emergent linear representations in world models of self-supervised sequence models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.00941, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[35]
Olshausen, B. A. and Field, D. J. Sparse coding with an overcomplete basis set: A strategy employed by v1? Vision research, 37 0 (23): 0 3311--3325, 1997
1997
-
[36]
Olshausen, B. A. and Field, D. J. Sparse coding of sensory inputs. Current opinion in neurobiology, 14 0 (4): 0 481--487, 2004
2004
-
[37]
Convolutional neural networks analyzed via convolutional sparse coding
Papyan, V., Romano, Y., and Elad, M. Convolutional neural networks analyzed via convolutional sparse coding. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 18 0 (83): 0 1--52, 2017
2017
-
[38]
Multi-scale feature learning dynamics: Insights for double descent
Pezeshki, M., Mitra, A., Bengio, Y., and Lajoie, G. Multi-scale feature learning dynamics: Insights for double descent. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.\ 17669--17690. PMLR, 2022
2022
-
[39]
Data augmentation as feature manipulation
Shen, R., Bubeck, S., and Gunasekar, S. Data augmentation as feature manipulation. In International conference on machine learning, pp.\ 19773--19808. PMLR, 2022
2022
-
[40]
Weak-to-strong generalization through the data-centric lens
Shin, C., Cooper, J., and Sala, F. Weak-to-strong generalization through the data-centric lens. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.03881, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[41]
M., Banerjee, M., Ritov, Y., Yurochkin, M., and Sun, Y
Somerstep, S., Polo, F. M., Banerjee, M., Ritov, Y., Yurochkin, M., and Sun, Y. A statistical framework for weak-to-strong generalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.16236, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[42]
Tropp, J. A. et al. An introduction to matrix concentration inequalities. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning , 8 0 (1-2): 0 1--230, 2015
2015
-
[43]
High-dimensional probability: An introduction with applications in data science, volume 47
Vershynin, R. High-dimensional probability: An introduction with applications in data science, volume 47. Cambridge university press, 2018
2018
-
[44]
Wainwright, M. J. High-dimensional statistics: A non-asymptotic viewpoint, volume 48. Cambridge university press, 2019
2019
-
[45]
Benign overfitting in multiclass classification: All roads lead to interpolation
Wang, K., Muthukumar, V., and Thrampoulidis, C. Benign overfitting in multiclass classification: All roads lead to interpolation. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 34: 0 24164--24179, 2021
2021
-
[46]
F., and Gardner, M
Welbl, J., Liu, N. F., and Gardner, M. Crowdsourcing multiple choice science questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06209, 2017
2017 arXiv
-
[47]
and Li, Y
Wen, Z. and Li, Y. Toward understanding the feature learning process of self-supervised contrastive learning. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.\ 11112--11122. PMLR, 2021
2021
-
[48]
Wu, D. X. and Sahai, A. Provable weak-to-strong generalization via benign overfitting. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.04638, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[49]
N., Gomes, J., Geniesse, C., Pappu, A
Wu, Z., Ramsundar, B., Feinberg, E. N., Gomes, J., Geniesse, C., Pappu, A. S., Leswing, K., and Pande, V. Moleculenet: a benchmark for molecular machine learning. Chemical science, 9 0 (2): 0 513--530, 2018
2018
-
[50]
Which features are learnt by contrastive learning? on the role of simplicity bias in class collapse and feature suppression
Xue, Y., Joshi, S., Gan, E., Chen, P.-Y., and Mirzasoleiman, B. Which features are learnt by contrastive learning? on the role of simplicity bias in class collapse and feature suppression. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp.\ 38938--38970. PMLR, 2023
2023
-
[51]
Linear spatial pyramid matching using sparse coding for image classification
Yang, J., Yu, K., Gong, Y., and Huang, T. Linear spatial pyramid matching using sparse coding for image classification. In 2009 IEEE Conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp.\ 1794--1801. IEEE, 2009
2009
-
[52]
Understanding deep learning (still) requires rethinking generalization
Zhang, C., Bengio, S., Hardt, M., Recht, B., and Vinyals, O. Understanding deep learning (still) requires rethinking generalization. Communications of the ACM, 64 0 (3): 0 107--115, 2021
2021
-
[53]
Character-level convolutional networks for text classification
Zhang, X., Zhao, J., and LeCun, Y. Character-level convolutional networks for text classification. Advances in neural information processing systems, 28, 2015
2015
-
[54]
Representation engineering: A top-down approach to ai transparency
Zou, A., Phan, L., Chen, S., Campbell, J., Guo, P., Ren, R., Pan, A., Yin, X., Mazeika, M., Dombrowski, A.-K., et al. Representation engineering: A top-down approach to ai transparency. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01405, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[55]
Understanding the generalization of adam in learning neural networks with proper regularization
Zou, D., Cao, Y., Li, Y., and Gu, Q. Understanding the generalization of adam in learning neural networks with proper regularization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.11371, 2021
2021 arXiv
Reviewed August 9, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.