Deep Double Descent: Where Bigger Models and More Data Hurt

We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a "double-descent" phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better. Moreover, we show that double descent occurs not just as a function of model size, but also as a function of the number of training epochs. We unify the above phenomena by defining a new complexity measure we call the effective model complexity and conjecture a generalized double descent with respect to this measure. Furthermore, our notion of model complexity allows us to identify certain regimes where increasing (even quadrupling) the number of train samples actually hurts test performance. Right: Test error, shown for varying train epochs. All models trained using Adam for 4K epochs. The bias-variance tradeoff is a fundamental concept in classical statistical learning theory (e.g., Hastie et al. (2005)). The idea is that models of higher complexity have lower bias but higher variance. According to this theory, once model complexity passes a certain threshold, models "overfit" with the variance term dominating the test error, and hence from this point onward, increasing model complexity will only decrease performance (i.e., increase test error). Hence conventional wisdom in classical statistics is that, once we pass a certain threshold, "larger models are worse. Such networks have millions of parameters, more than enough to fit even random labels (Zhang et al. (2016)), and yet they perform much better on many tasks than smaller models. Indeed, conventional wisdom among practitioners is that "larger models are better' ' (Krizhevsky et al. (2012), Huang et al. (2018), Szegedy et al.