Cited by 287Privacy-Preserving Technologies in DataStochastic Gradient Optimization TechniquesDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Does learning require memorization? a short tale about a long tail

Open access
Feldman, Vitaly·2020·Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing

Abstract

State-of-the-art results on image recognition tasks are achieved using over-parameterized learning algorithms that (nearly) perfectly fit the training set and are known to fit well even random labels. This tendency to memorize seemingly useless training data labels is not explained by existing theoretical analyses. Memorization of the training data also presents significant privacy risks when the training data contains sensitive personal information and thus it is important to understand whether such memorization is necessary for accurate learning.

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  • Complex models like neural networks are likely more susceptible to leakage due to their ability to memorize data.

    “Yet, complex models like neural networks are likely more susceptible to leakage due to their ability to memorize data52,53.”

    From Data leakage inflates prediction performance in connectome-based machine learning models (2024) · cites this paper as [53]

    The Introduction says deep neural networks can memorize training examples, and the Abstract says memorization poses significant privacy risks when training data contain sensitive personal information. The paper does not establish the comparative claim that complex models are more susceptible to leakage than other models. No page numbers are provided in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.85)

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Research works printed but not linked: 12

  1. Rohit Babbar and Bernhard Schölkopf. 2017. Dismec: Distributed sparse machines for extreme multi-label classification. In Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on web search and data mining. ACM, 721-729.
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  5. Olivier Bousquet and André Elisseeff. 2002. Stability and generalization. JMLR 2 (2002), 499-526.
  6. Vitaly Feldman. 2019. Does Learning Require Memorization? A Short Tale about a Long Tail. CoRR abs/1906.05271 (2019). arXiv:1906.05271 http://arxiv.org/abs/ 1906.05271 · arXiv
  7. Yuanzhi Li, Tengyu Ma, and Hongyang Zhang. 2018. Algorithmic Regularization in Over-parameterized Matrix Sensing and Neural Networks with Quadratic Activations. In Conference On Learning Theory. 2-47.
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Authors
Feldman, V.
Affiliations
Google (United States) (US)
Corresponding author
Feldman, Vitaly
Venue
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-06-22
Pages
954-959
OpenAlex
W2950181023
Cited by
287
References
76
Citations by year
2026: 33 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 54 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 51 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 3
FWCI
14.33
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Stochastic Gradient Optimization Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
memorization, image recognition, privacy risks, training data memorization

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