Abstract
Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quantitative measure of simplicity remains elusive. We introduce polynomial representations as a distribution-aware, low-dimensional surrogate for neural functions: we approximate a network's predictive behavior along data-dependent interpolation paths using orthogonal polynomial bases, yielding a compact functional representation. We show that the effective degree of this representation serves as a practical simplicity metric that is predictive of generalization across tasks and architectures, and consistently outperforms existing generalization proxies such as sharpness. Finally, polynomial representations naturally yield a differentiable simplicity regularizer, which consistently improves generalization in image and text classification, fine-tuning contrastive vision-language models, and reinforcement learning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29823
