Early stopping
Also known as: early stop
Early stopping is the simplest anti-overfitting trick: watch the validation loss, and stop training the moment it stops improving (or starts to rise).
- Train loss keeps falling (memorizing).
- Validation loss plateaus/rises (overfitting).
- Stop, keep the best checkpoint.
The discipline: always monitor a *held-out* set. The moment it stops improving, further training is usually just memorization.