# Trustworthy Machine Learning via Memorization and the Granular Long-Tail: A Survey on Interactions, Tradeoffs, and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 163 of its 222 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 163)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Reconciling modern machine learning practice and the bias-variance trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11118/) (2018)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [Robustness May Be at Odds with Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12152/) (2018)
- [Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03570/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Robustness in Large Language Models: A Survey of Mitigation Strategies and Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18658/) (2025)
- [Shared Path: Unraveling Memorization in Multilingual LLMs through Language Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15722/) (2025)
- [Do LLMs Really Memorize Personally Identifiable Information? Revisiting PII Leakage with a Cue-Controlled Memorization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03791/) (2026)
- [Characterizing Memorization in Diffusion Language Models: Generalized Extraction and Sampling Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02333/) (2026)
- [Memorization in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19352/) (2025)
- [APEX: Probing Neural Networks via Activation Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The role of memorization in machine learning (ML) has garnered significant attention, particularly as modern models are empirically observed to memorize fragments of training data. Previous theoretical analyses, such as Feldman's seminal work, attribute memorization to the prevalence of long-tail distributions in training data, proving it unavoidable for samples that lie in the tail of the distribution. However, the intersection of memorization and trustworthy ML research reveals critical gaps. While prior research in memorization in trustworthy ML has solely focused on class imbalance, recent work starts to differentiate class-level rarity from atypical samples, which are valid and rare intra-class instances. However, a critical research gap remains: current frameworks conflate atypical samples with noisy and erroneous data, neglecting their divergent impacts on fairness, robustness, and privacy. In this work, we conduct a thorough survey of existing research and their findings on trustworthy ML and the role of memorization. More and beyond, we identify and highlight uncharted gaps and propose new revenues in this research direction. Since existing theoretical and empirical analyses lack the nuances to disentangle memorization's duality as both a necessity and a liability, we formalize three-level long-tail granularity - class imbalance, atypicality, and noise - to reveal how current frameworks misapply these levels, perpetuating flawed solutions. By systematizing this granularity, we draw a roadmap for future research. Trustworthy ML must reconcile the nuanced trade-offs between memorizing atypicality for fairness assurance and suppressing noise for robustness and privacy guarantee. Redefining memorization via this granularity reshapes the theoretical foundation for trustworthy ML, and further affords an empirical prerequisite for models that align performance with societal trust.