Papers › Characterizing Structural Regularities of Labeled Data in Overparameterized Models

Characterizing Structural Regularities of Labeled Data in Overparameterized Models

8 Feb 2020arXiv:2002.03206archive 2025-07-28

Ziheng Jiang, Chiyuan Zhang, Kunal Talwar, Michael C. Mozer

Humans are accustomed to environments that contain both regularities and exceptions. For example, at most gas stations, one pays prior to pumping, but the occasional rural station does not accept payment in advance. Likewise, deep neural networks can generalize across instances that share common patterns or structures, yet have the capacity to memorize rare or irregular forms. We analyze how individual instances are treated by a model via a consistency score. The score characterizes the expected accuracy for a held-out instance given training sets of varying size sampled from the data distribution. We obtain empirical estimates of this score for individual instances in multiple data sets, and we show that the score identifies out-of-distribution and mislabeled examples at one end of the continuum and strongly regular examples at the other end. We identify computationally inexpensive proxies to the consistency score using statistics collected during training. We show examples of potential applications to the analysis of deep-learning systems.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

google-research/heldout-influence-estimation mentioned on GitHubjaxApache-2.0 report
pluskid/structural-regularity mentioned on GitHubjax report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Density EstimationOut-of-Distribution DetectionRepresentation Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections