Neural collapse in the orthoplex regime

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.