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Main Authors: van der Klis, Robert, Torres, Ricardo Chávez, van Spengler, Max, Ding, Yuhui, Hofmann, Thomas, Mettes, Pascal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21529
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author van der Klis, Robert
Torres, Ricardo Chávez
van Spengler, Max
Ding, Yuhui
Hofmann, Thomas
Mettes, Pascal
author_facet van der Klis, Robert
Torres, Ricardo Chávez
van Spengler, Max
Ding, Yuhui
Hofmann, Thomas
Mettes, Pascal
contents Hyperbolic space is quickly gaining traction as a promising geometry for hierarchical and robust representation learning. A core open challenge is the development of a mathematical formulation of hyperbolic neural networks that is both efficient and captures the key properties of hyperbolic space. The Lorentz model of hyperbolic space has been shown to enable both fast forward and backward propagation. However, we prove that, with the current formulation of Lorentz linear layers, the hyperbolic norms of the outputs scale logarithmically with the number of gradient descent steps, nullifying the key advantage of hyperbolic geometry. We propose a new Lorentz linear layer grounded in the well-known ``distance-to-hyperplane" formulation. We prove that our formulation results in the usual linear scaling of output hyperbolic norms with respect to the number of gradient descent steps. Our new formulation, together with further algorithmic efficiencies through Lorentzian activation functions and a new caching strategy results in neural networks fully abiding by hyperbolic geometry while simultaneously bridging the computation gap to Euclidean neural networks. Code available at: https://github.com/robertdvdk/hyperbolic-fully-connected.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21529
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast and Geometrically Grounded Lorentz Neural Networks
van der Klis, Robert
Torres, Ricardo Chávez
van Spengler, Max
Ding, Yuhui
Hofmann, Thomas
Mettes, Pascal
Machine Learning
Hyperbolic space is quickly gaining traction as a promising geometry for hierarchical and robust representation learning. A core open challenge is the development of a mathematical formulation of hyperbolic neural networks that is both efficient and captures the key properties of hyperbolic space. The Lorentz model of hyperbolic space has been shown to enable both fast forward and backward propagation. However, we prove that, with the current formulation of Lorentz linear layers, the hyperbolic norms of the outputs scale logarithmically with the number of gradient descent steps, nullifying the key advantage of hyperbolic geometry. We propose a new Lorentz linear layer grounded in the well-known ``distance-to-hyperplane" formulation. We prove that our formulation results in the usual linear scaling of output hyperbolic norms with respect to the number of gradient descent steps. Our new formulation, together with further algorithmic efficiencies through Lorentzian activation functions and a new caching strategy results in neural networks fully abiding by hyperbolic geometry while simultaneously bridging the computation gap to Euclidean neural networks. Code available at: https://github.com/robertdvdk/hyperbolic-fully-connected.
title Fast and Geometrically Grounded Lorentz Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21529