English

Neural collapse in the orthoplex regime

Machine Learning 2026-03-24 v1 Information Theory math.IT Metric Geometry

Abstract

When training a neural network for classification, the feature vectors of the training set are known to collapse to the vertices of a regular simplex, provided the dimension dd of the feature space and the number nn of classes satisfies nd+1n\leq d+1. This phenomenon is known as neural collapse. For other applications like language models, one instead takes ndn\gg d. Here, the neural collapse phenomenon still occurs, but with different emergent geometric figures. We characterize these geometric figures in the orthoplex regime where d+2n2dd+2\leq n\leq 2d. The techniques in our analysis primarily involve Radon's theorem and convexity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.20587,
  title  = {Neural collapse in the orthoplex regime},
  author = {James Alcala and Rayna Andreeva and Vladimir A. Kobzar and Dustin G. Mixon and Sanghoon Na and Shashank Sule and Yangxinyu Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.20587},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:30:54.851Z