Non-Euclidean geometry with constant negative curvature, i.e., hyperbolic space, has attracted sustained attention in the community of machine learning. Hyperbolic space, owing to its ability to embed hierarchical structures continuously with low distortion, has been applied for learning data with tree-like structures. Hyperbolic Neural Networks (HNNs) that operate directly in hyperbolic space have also been proposed recently to further exploit the potential of hyperbolic representations. While HNNs have achieved better performance than Euclidean neural networks (ENNs) on datasets with implicit hierarchical structure, they still perform poorly on standard classification benchmarks such as CIFAR and ImageNet. The traditional wisdom is that it is critical for the data to respect the hyperbolic geometry when applying HNNs. In this paper, we first conduct an empirical study showing that the inferior performance of HNNs on standard recognition datasets can be attributed to the notorious vanishing gradient problem. We further discovered that this problem stems from the hybrid architecture of HNNs. Our analysis leads to a simple yet effective solution called Feature Clipping, which regularizes the hyperbolic embedding whenever its norm exceeding a given threshold. Our thorough experiments show that the proposed method can successfully avoid the vanishing gradient problem when training HNNs with backpropagation. The improved HNNs are able to achieve comparable performance with ENNs on standard image recognition datasets including MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet, while demonstrating more adversarial robustness and stronger out-of-distribution detection capability.
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