  Overfitting negatively impacts the generalization ability of deep neural
networks (DNNs) in both natural and adversarial training. Existing methods
struggle to consistently address different types of overfitting, typically
designing strategies that focus separately on either natural or adversarial
patterns. In this work, we adopt a unified perspective by solely focusing on
natural patterns to explore different types of overfitting. Specifically, we
examine the memorization effect in DNNs and reveal a shared behaviour termed
over-memorization, which impairs their generalization capacity. This behaviour
manifests as DNNs suddenly becoming high-confidence in predicting certain
training patterns and retaining a persistent memory for them. Furthermore, when
DNNs over-memorize an adversarial pattern, they tend to simultaneously exhibit
high-confidence prediction for the corresponding natural pattern. These
findings motivate us to holistically mitigate different types of overfitting by
hindering the DNNs from over-memorization training patterns. To this end, we
propose a general framework, Distraction Over-Memorization (DOM), which
explicitly prevents over-memorization by either removing or augmenting the
high-confidence natural patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed method in mitigating overfitting across various
training paradigms.
