The Pitfalls of Simplicity Bias in Neural Networks

Several works have proposed Simplicity Bias (SB)---the tendency of standard training procedures such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to find simple models---to justify why neural networks generalize well [Arpit et al. 2017, Nakkiran et al. 2019, Valle-Perez et al. 2019]. However, the precise notion of simplicity remains vague. Furthermore, previous settings [Soudry et al. 2018, Gunasekar et al. 2018] that use SB to theoretically justify why neural networks generalize well do not simultaneously capture the non-robustness of neural networks---a widely observed phenomenon in practice [Goodfellow et al. 2014, Jo and Bengio 2017]. We attempt to reconcile SB and the superior standard generalization of neural networks with the non-robustness observed in practice by introducing piecewise-linear and image-based datasets, which (a) incorporate a precise notion of simplicity, (b) comprise multiple predictive features with varying levels of simplicity, and (c) capture the non-robustness of neural networks trained on real data. Using theory and empirics on these datasets, we make four observations: (i) SB of SGD and variants can be extreme: neural networks can exclusively rely on the simplest feature and remain invariant to all predictive complex features.