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 of the feature space and the number of classes satisfies . This phenomenon is known as neural collapse. For other applications like language models, one instead takes . Here, the neural collapse phenomenon still occurs, but with different emergent geometric figures. We characterize these geometric figures in the orthoplex regime where . 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}
}