Neural collapse in the orthoplex regime

arXiv cs.LG / 3/24/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies “neural collapse” in classification training, where feature vectors converge to the vertices of a regular simplex when the class count satisfies n ≤ d+1 in feature space dimension d.
  • It extends this analysis to language-model-like settings with n ≫ d, showing that neural collapse can still occur but the limiting geometry changes from a simplex to new emergent structures.
  • The authors specifically characterize the emergent geometric figures in the “orthoplex regime,” where class count satisfies d+2 ≤ n ≤ 2d.
  • Their mathematical approach relies mainly on Radon’s theorem and convexity to derive and describe the geometry of the collapsed features.

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 d of the feature space and the number n of classes satisfies n\leq d+1. This phenomenon is known as neural collapse. For other applications like language models, one instead takes n\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+2\leq n\leq 2d. The techniques in our analysis primarily involve Radon's theorem and convexity.