{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-empirical-study-of-memorization-in-nlp","title":"An Empirical Study of Memorization in NLP","arxiv_id":"2203.12171","date":"2022-03-23","proceeding":"ACL 2022 5","authors":["Xiaosen Zheng","Jing Jiang"],"abstract":"A recent study by Feldman (2020) proposed a long-tail theory to explain the memorization behavior of deep learning models. However, memorization has not been empirically verified in the context of NLP, a gap addressed by this work. In this paper, we use three different NLP tasks to check if the long-tail theory holds. Our experiments demonstrate that top-ranked memorized training instances are likely atypical, and removing the top-memorized training instances leads to a more serious drop in test accuracy compared with removing training instances randomly. Furthermore, we develop an attribution method to better understand why a training instance is memorized. We empirically show that our memorization attribution method is faithful, and share our interesting finding that the top-memorized parts of a training instance tend to be features negatively correlated with the class label.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12171v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.12171v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-empirical-study-of-memorization-in-nlp","repo_url":"https://github.com/xszheng2020/memorization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"memorization","task_name":"Memorization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.12171","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}