go-$m$HC: Direct Parameterization of Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections via Generalized Orthostochastic Matrices

arXiv cs.LG / 4/3/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces an exact, efficient parameterization of the Birkhoff polytope (doubly stochastic matrices) using generalized orthostochastic matrices, avoiding factorial scaling while retaining full expressivity.
  • The proposed parameterization scales as O(d^3) and uses a single hyperparameter s to continuously interpolate between an efficient boundary solution and the fully expressive set.
  • It is integrated into Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections, yielding go-$m$HC, which composes with Kronecker-factorized methods to substantially recover lost expressivity at similar FLOP cost.
  • Spectral analysis and synthetic experiments show go-$m$HC better covers the Birkhoff polytope than Kronecker baselines, reaching the minimum theoretical loss and converging up to 10× faster.
  • The authors validate the approach in a 30M-parameter GPT-style language model, arguing it enables scaling residual-stream mixing capacity by treating the stream dimension d as an additional capacity axis.

Abstract

Doubly stochastic matrices enable learned mixing across residual streams, but parameterizing the set of doubly stochastic matrices (the Birkhoff polytope) exactly and efficiently remains an open challenge. Existing exact methods scale factorially with the number of streams (d), while Kronecker-factorized approaches are efficient but expressivity-limited. We introduce a novel exact parameterization grounded in the theory of generalized orthostochastic matrices, which scales as \mathcal{O}(d^3) and exposes a single hyperparameter s which continuously interpolates between a computationally efficient boundary and the fully expressive Birkhoff polytope. Building on Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), a framework for learned dynamic layer connectivity, we instantiate this parameterization in go-mHC. Our method composes naturally with Kronecker-factorized methods, substantially recovering expressivity at similar FLOP costs. Spectral analysis indicates that go-mHC fills the Birkhoff polytope far more completely than Kronecker-factorized baselines. On synthetic stream-mixing tasks, go-mHC achieves the minimum theoretical loss while converging up to 10\times faster. We validate our approach in a 30M parameter GPT-style language model. The expressivity, efficiency, and exactness of go-mHC offer a practical avenue for scaling d as a new dimension of model capacity.

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